That brings us to the end of this module on high availability.
You should now have a good idea how to expand your VPN and NPS infrastructure,
adding additional servers to eliminate single points of failure,
and make the solution more redundant and more resilient.
This is crucial to maintaining service availability,
because as we know, Windows Servers need to be updated periodically,
like every month, and those updates commonly require the server to be restarted.
So,
having a redundant infrastructure in place ensures the
service remains up even during planned outages,
like Windows Updates.
And, of course, this means that if a server is offline for any unplanned outage,
again,
we can maintain the service while administrators work to address the issue.
Of course, for many larger deployments,
deploying a single VPN server or a single NPS server
simply won't provide enough capacity,
so adding more servers becomes necessary to ensure that we
have enough resources to meet demand.
And finally,
I would encourage you to investigate the use of a
dedicated third‑party external load balancer.
This is going to provide not only the best performance,
but really the best experience overall.
NLB works, of course,
but an external load balancer provides more advanced features,
better visibility control of network traffic,
including, you know, traffic distribution,
and load balancing algorithms, and so forth,
which ultimately make your life, as the Always On VPN administrator,
that much easier.
But integrated Windows NLB is supported, and it does work. I would
just caution you that it may not be the best choice,
especially for larger deployments. Join me in the next module, where we discuss monitoring and reporting options.