Book Image

Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010 Administrator's Handbook

By : Erez Ben-Ari, Ran Dolev, Erez Y Ben
Book Image

Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010 Administrator's Handbook

By: Erez Ben-Ari, Ran Dolev, Erez Y Ben

Overview of this book

Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG) is the latest in a line of Application Publishing (Reverse Proxy) and Remote Access (VPN) Server products. The broad set of features and technologies integrated into UAG makes for a steep learning curve. Understanding all the features and abilities of UAG is a complex task that can be daunting even to experienced networking and security engineers. This book is the first to be dedicated solely to Microsoft Forefront UAG. It guides you step-by-step throughout all the stages of deployment, from design to troubleshooting. Written by the absolute experts who have taken part of the product’s development, official training and support, this book covers all the primary features of UAG in a friendly style and a manner that is easy to follow. It takes you from the initial planning and design stage, through deployment and configuration, up to maintenance and troubleshooting. The book starts by introducing UAG's features and and abilities, and how your organization can benefit from them. It then goes on to guide you through planning and designing the integration of the product into your own unique environment. Further, the book guides you through the process of publishing the various applications, servers and resources - from simple web applications to complex client/server based applications. It also details the various VPN technologies that UAG provides and how to take full advantage of them. The later chapters of the book educate you with common routine “upkeep” tasks like monitoring, backup and troubleshooting of common issues. Finally, the book includes an introduction to ASP, which some of the product's features are based on, and can help the advanced administrator with enhancing and customizing the product.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010 Administrator's Handbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

NLB and Arrays


Load Balancing (LB) is a very important feature for many organizations, because the number of users that the organization needs to service may be greater than what a single UAG server can handle. Once a single server has maxed out its CPU or memory, the only thing you can do is to distribute the load between two or more servers. Load balancing is done via a mechanism that intercepts a user's request, and redirects it to one of the servers configured as a load-balanced cluster. There are plenty of load-balancer devices on the market, such as F5's Big-IP or a Celestix XLB device, and Windows itself also has a built-in mechanism to do the same thing.

Most load balancing services can also check the servers they are balancing for signs of life, and in case a server stops responding, re-distribute the load between the other members; so that users have as little interruption as possible (it's still interrupted, though—more about that later).

When servers are load balanced, they are...