BIG-IP and UNC Shares

I'm not sure it's a matter of load-balancing Microsoft UNC as it is load balancing file shares in general. There are people using LB appliances to load balance NFS file shares for quite some time now. The issue with Microsoft network files shares is connecting to file shares requires authentication and imbedded IP addresses in the data payload unique to NetBIOS traffic, so the actual requests can't really be effectively "load balanced", but merely "forwarded" and simple DR (if a server fails redirect all requests to another IP address). For a couple of file servers, that simple functionality is still more efficiently done with simple (and inexpensive compared to a full ADN solution) NLB software which has been included free with the Windows server platform since Win2003.

 

 

But for Microsoft web-based applications and IIS servers themselves (to distinguish between the UNC which is based on WINS & NetBIOS over TCP as opposed to pure DNS resolution of the URL or the host portion of the URI), most current Windows applications (SharePoint, Exchange, IIS, etc) are based on the latter, which means Application Delivery Appliances are the most common solution recommended by ADN vendors and Microsoft alike (see "The Application Ready Network for Microsoft" - for more information see http://www.f5.com/communication/events/application-ready-network.html ).