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Any Open-Source or Freeware load balancing server available out there for windows?

I basically want to balance network bandwidth. e.g. I have 10 MBPS internet line and 50 machines connected to server, I want usage of internet from any machine shouldn't clog entire network. I want to balance bandwidth among all clients.

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Be more specific about what you want to load balance. – pauska Dec 4 '09 at 13:25

3 Answers

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What you are asking for is not called a load-balancer - that term is usually reserved for appliances which balance incoming traffic across multiple servers.

It's the clients that are the problem here, so what you're after is quality of service (QoS) management.

Unfortunately, you're mostly at the wrong end of the link to prevent an individual client from clogging your line. Normally the place to throttle a client is on the transmit part of the link, and for internet downloads that's at your ISPs end of your internet connection.

If there's a particular application (e.g. inbound e-mail) which you want to ensure always works, ask your ISP if they've got any QoS features that can reserve some of your 10 Mbps for that. Without that, every TCP connection will use as much of the bandwidth as its able to.

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Ok, fare enuf!, but can't I configure server so that it distribute bandwidth among active clients so that any client wont clog bandwidth n use full of it while others crawling. – Bhavesh.Bagadiya Dec 4 '09 at 13:53
Any single TCP stream will nominally only get its fair share of the bandwidth. The only way to control download rates from your end is to cause TCP to back off by dropping packets from the heavy streams. Unfortunately that's potentially counter productive. – Alnitak Dec 4 '09 at 14:16
ohh! Thanks for your answer though. :) – Bhavesh.Bagadiya Dec 4 '09 at 14:18
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What do you want to load balance?

If you are talking about network load balancing (i.e. sharing a single IP address between multiple machines), Windows already has it in all available editions.

If you are talking about failover clustering, Windows has in in the Enterprise (or higher) editions.

If you are talking about something else... well, what exactly?

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windows server 2008 standard allows failover clustering! – Nick Kavadias Dec 4 '09 at 13:14
I basically want to balance network bandwidth. e.g. I have 10 MBPS internet line and 50 machines connected to server, I want usage of internet from any machine shouldn't clog entire network. I want to balance bandwidth among all clients. – Bhavesh.Bagadiya Dec 4 '09 at 13:26
if you can, add this to your question, or it'll just get more down-votes for being vague. – Alnitak Dec 4 '09 at 14:31
up vote 1 down vote

Take a look at NetLimiter:

http://www.netlimiter.com/

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