Load balancing Microsoft SharePoint

About Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint is Microsoft’s enterprise collaboration platform. SharePoint makes it easier for people to work together. Using SharePoint, staff can set up websites to share information with others, manage documents from start to finish, publish reports to help everyone make better decisions and search across a range of internal and external data sources to find answers and information more quickly and effectively.

Key benefits of load balancing

Here are a few key benefits:

Ensures the application is always available
Provides a stable, optimal performance
Ability to isolate servers which reduces risk when performing upgrades/maintenance
Scalability

Microsoft’s Enterprise solutions are at the heart of businesses everywhere. Loadbalancer.org is officially certified for all of Microsoft’s key applications which you can find here. More details on the SharePoint components, how it works, and prerequisites for load balancing can be found in our deployment guide, available to view below.

How to load balance Microsoft SharePoint

Example load balanced Sharepoint front end deployment illustrating SSL termination, WAF traffic inspection and SSL re-encryption.

Supported Microsoft Sharepoint Protocols

Protocol	Ports	Load balancing methods
HTTP	80	Layer 7 SNAT (Recommended) Using Reverse Proxy mode is the easiest and most flexible load balancing method, offering advanced URL switching, cookie insertion and WAFcapabilities. Layer 4 DR Direct Routing has the advantage of being fully transparent and seriously fast but requires solving the arp problem. Layer 4 NAT Traditional NAT mode gives easy to implement fast and transparent load balancing but usually requires a two-arm configuration (two subnets).
HTTPS	443	All load balancing methods can be easily configured for SSL Pass-through. This has the advantage of being fast, secure and easy to maintain. Identical SSL certificates will need to exist on each of your backend servers for pass-through security. SSL Termination or off-loading must be used when advanced Layer 7 functionality such as cookies or URL switching is required. You can also implement SNI if you have multiple domain certificates one one public IP address. Optional re-encryption is also available between the load balancer and IIS.