Background

My company has recently instituted a corporate policy that all servers are to have IP addresses that are issued via DHCP reservations to simplify the management of our IP scopes. We have a Windows 2008 R2 Failover Cluster that is comprised of two servers to host our ERP system. I have changed the physical NICs on these servers to pull from DCHP reservations.

Issue

In the properties screen of the IP Address resource for my clustered service, which happens to be SQL, I can change the "IP Address" setting from Static IP Address to DHCP Enabled; however, there is no option to configure a MAC address.

Question

How do I configure an IP Address resource to take on specific MAC address so that a DHCP reservation can be created? If this cannot be accomplished, then is there another way to get a DHCP reservation in place?

Considerations

A new scope can be created for those devices/services that do not support retrieving their IP from DHCP, but this will likely not be available for a couple of months.

I am using Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009's Role-Tailored Client (RTC), which utilizes a 3-tier architecture. The middle tier, which Microsoft calls the service tier, is a non-cluster-aware application that runs as a Windows service. I've identified through another question that I should pursue running a clustered hypervisor with a virtual machine running the NAV Service Tier.

Unfortunately, the NAV Service Tier has a recommended maximum user capacity of 50-60 users. With over 100 concurrent users, I will need some mechanism to "load balance" all of the sessions without having to visit each user's workstation and "hard-code" it to a specific server. Sessions will need to be sticky in that every request after the initial request will need to be routed to the same server.

How can I load balance a Windows service which is not IIS-based and meets the requirements I've outlined?

I am using Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2009's Role-Tailored Client (RTC), which utilizes a 3-tier architecture. The middle tier, which Microsoft calls the service tier, is a non-cluster-aware application that runs as a Windows service. I've identified that I need a virtual IP and name so that my Windows cluster can at a minimum start/stop the service on one of the clustered servers. I currently have two servers with Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise and are clustered.

How can I make the service tier application/service cluster-aware to a level that I can make it highly available?