Validating New Front End Servers

At this stage, you have installed and activated two additional consolidated Front End Servers that are fully configured. Although there is no load balancer in place, the Front End Servers themselves should be fully functional and able to handle workloads. In this section, you will validate the basic functionality of your two new Front End Servers so that when you configure the load balancer VIP, you can focus your troubleshooting on the load balancer. In addition, this testing will not affect your production users.

To perform this testing, first add a temporary hostfile entry on each newly installed Front End Server, pointing the FQDN of the existing pool to the IP address of that particular Front End Server. You take this step because Front End Servers use the pool name to contact certain resources. Setting the pool FQDN to resolve to itself ensures that we are using only that server to handle all test scenarios. For instance, in our sample topology, follow these steps:

  1. On ocsfe01.contoso.com, add a hosts file entry that resolves ocspool.contoso.com to 10.0.0.41.

  2. In a command window, run ipconfig /flushdnsto clear the DNS cache.

  3. Restart all services on the Front End Server to ensure that they use the updated IP address.

  4. Repeat the above steps on ocsfe02.contoso.com, using an IP address of 10.0.0.42.

Next, prepare three test workstations with the Office Communicator, Outlook, and Live Meeting clients and perform the following steps:

  1. Add a hosts file entry on each client that resolves ocspool.contoso.comto 10.0.0.41.

  2. In a command window, run ipconfig /flushdnsto clear the DNS cache.

  3. In Office Communicator, configure connection settings to Manual, specifying ocspool.contoso.comas the internal server name.

  4. In the Live Meeting Client, configure connection settings to Manual, specifying ocspool.contoso.comas the internal server name.

  5. Using the test clients, sign in to Office Communicator by using some test accounts that you create, and then verify that all peer-to-peer and conference modalities work, including IM, voice, video, and desktop sharing.

  6. Use one of the test clients to schedule a Live Meeting conference by using Outlook. Join the meeting, and then verify that all Web conferencing modalities work.

  7. Update the hosts file entry on each client to resolve ocspool.contoso.comto 10.0.0.42.

  8. Repeat steps 2 through 6 to validate functionality on the second Front End Server. If any issues are discovered, troubleshoot and correct them before you configure a load balancer.

By completing these validation tasks, you can be more confident that when you add a load balancer to the topology, any unexpected behavior is likely to be caused by the Load Balancer and not by the Front End Servers themselves. The final step is to remove the test settings that you configured:

  1. On ocsfe01.contoso.comand ocsfe02.contoso.com, remove the hosts file entry that resolved ocspool.contoso.com.

  2. In a command window, run ipconfig /flushdnsto clear the DNS cache.

  3. Restart all services on the Front End Server to ensure they use the updated IP address.

  4. On the test clients, remove the hosts file entry that resolved ocspool.contoso.com.

  5. In a command window, run ipconfig /flushdnsto clear the DNS cache.

  6. Reset Office Communicator and Live Meeting clients to use automatic server lookup.

  7. Restart the test clients to ensure that they do not use any cached DNS entries.