The last couple days I have been struggling a lot while setting up NLB (Network Load Balance) between two web servers.  I was beating my head up against the desk when I was trying to add the second host to the cluster inside the Network Load Balancing Manager on Windows Server 2003.

For background, I have a web server that we will call ws1.  It is working fine and is a guest on an ESX server.  I wanted to make two more servers out of this one so I used VM’s Converter.  This worked great.

Now I had ws2 and ws3.  The next step was to some how get the ESX Host to assign these VM’s with new UUID’s.  I ended up in the datastore renaming the folder with the VM’s in them.  What this does is it copies the entire folder, renames it and then deletes the old folder.  I think it does this because ESX is running on Linux server.

Once this is done, I can add the VM’s back into the inventory and it prompts me to do something with the UUID.

I chose to Create a new identifier.

Once this was done, I came across a different issue when I tried to create the NLB cluster.  I was able to create the cluster fine.

I also could add the first VM just fine.

But as soon as I tried to add ws3, I had an issue.  When I tried to connect to the host (ws3) I go the following error. “No interfaces are available for installing a new cluster”

What I found out was that their was an issue between the Network Connections.  Since they were actually both the same machine (since I converted both VM’s from the same server (ws1)), the Network Load Balance Manager was seeing the Network Connections as being the same.  In order to fix this I had to go into the VM settings for both ws2 and ws3 and add another network connection as seen below.

Once I started the VM up, I just changed the IP settings for the new Network Connection and named it External, and renamed the old Network Connection “Do-Not-USE”

After all that I could now add both servers to my Network Load Balance Manager and to the cluster.  I am not sure if this all makes sense, but for those who come across the same issue, I hope this will help. 

~Michael Silva - MikePixel