Dynamics Community Forum Thread Details

Seeking Recommendations for Load Balancing Setup for Business Central On‑Prem (3 Application Tiers)

Hello everyone,

We’re planning to introduce a load balancing solution for our Business Central On‑Prem environment and would like to run three Application Tiers in a load‑balanced cluster for our production system.

I would appreciate your insights on the following:

Which solutions exist (hardware & software)?
- What are the common load balancers used with Business Central On‑Prem (e.g., hardware appliances vs. software/L7 proxies vs. Windows NLB)?
- Any recommendations or pitfalls from your experience?
Which types of load balancing are available?
- Are there active load balancers that monitor server health and load (e.g., CPU, sessions, response time) and intelligently route or redistribute users accordingly?
- Or are we limited to “simple” round‑robin balancing?
- What session affinity (“sticky sessions”) options do you recommend for BC Web Client / API scenarios?
What are the prerequisites on the Business Central On‑Prem side to achieve reliable load balancing?
- Required configuration on the Application Tiers (e.g., identical configuration, extensions, language packs, caching considerations).
- Guidance on session handling, authentication (Windows/AD vs. AAD, Kerberos/NTLM, SPNs, delegation), and SSL/TLS offloading or passthrough.
- Considerations for Web Server (IIS), reverse proxies, certificates, and PublicWebBaseUrl consistency.
- Any specifics for background sessions, job queues, and long‑running operations in a clustered setup.