No soup for you! Is Cisco the Soup Nazi of NLB products?

Today, I tried to access a document library via windows explorer.  This doc lib is living inside a system that consists of two WFE’s load balanced by some kind of Cisco NLB solution.  (If/when the network wizards tell me what it is, I’ll update this post).

Windows explorer couldn’t connect.  I did some research and eventually, the network wizards said that WebDAV is disabled by / not supported by / beneath the dignity of the NLB.

So, assuming the network wizards aren’t just telling me the network wizard equivalent of "take a long walk off a short bridge", I have to wonder — does NLB, by nature, disable WebDAV?  Do we lose our windows file explorer interface to SharePoint?  Is Cisco the Soup Nazi?

2 thoughts on “No soup for you! Is Cisco the Soup Nazi of NLB products?

  1. Paul Galvin
    Thanks for the detailed comment about things to look for to trouble shoot the Cisco NLB config.
     
    I’m going to forward that on to the network people.
    Reply
  2. Craig Swain
    No it does not.  Problem may arise from improper configuration of a Layer 3 Switch with respect to the VLANs.  NLB because it uses a virtual MAC address will require a VLAN dedicated to the NLB interfaces.  Also if the FE Web servers are not dual homed, the system becomes unstable.  MS and Cisco have documented this behavior in KB articles.  Beyond the NLB configuration, I’d also look at the system policy set.  Many "locked down" networks will disable some of the web client options on the client machine.  I’ve mistaken that for a network issue a time or two.
    Reply

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