Production Setup of SharePoint 2010 and SSRS Load balanced with NLB

Production Setup:

1. Two Web Front Ends (Network Load balanced) - No Central Administration
2. Two Application Servers (Includes SharePoint, Power Pivot and SSRS Servers - Network Load balanced) - Both Servers contain Central Administration
3. Clustered Database (Active-Passive Mode)
4. SAN (Later switched to NAS) for storage of terabytes of Images. Product involves storing a lot of images.

All machines were Windows Server 2008 R2 with imaginably very high configuration on memory and hard drive.

SharePoint does not require you to load balance the Application Server, however in this specific case the requirement was to have high availability of the application and provision for scaling later.

First configure the DB in a clustered mode. This was already done by the DBA, so I will not cover it here.

Next, configure the Report Server in a scale out mode over a NLB

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc281307.aspx

To setup and configure the SharePoint, we followed the steps mentioned in the below article with a few exceptions (Configuring Search was not required).

http://www.jppinto.com/2010/07/sharepoint-2010-installation-overview-table-of-contents/ 

http://www.khamis.net/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?List=6c8a23d1%2D47ea%2D47e5%2Db56f%2D2bc57cb95b93&ID=48&Web=d64cd8b3%2Da3f4%2D40d8%2D8d93%2D6aa6dc82fcda

We made sure that all the Service applications (Excel, Power Pivot & Secured Store Service) were provisioned on both the Application Servers.

Make sure to have only the required services in the WFE. You can turn off all the Service Applications that are provisioned on the Application Servers.

Next, setup the Power Pivot on both the Application Server and re-configure the Power Pivot Service Application from the Central Administration.

http://www.cjvandyk.com/blog/Articles/How%20do%20I%20-%20Install%20PowerPivot%20into%20an%20EXISTING%20SharePoint%202010%20farm.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee210616.aspx

Once the Configuration was done, most of the steps were custom. 

Few things that is worth of mentioning:

1. Ensure that your domain name and web site names are not the same. We had a very hard time reverting it as users internally to the company were not able to use the Web Site. The reason, was all the requests to the site was going to the Domain Controller instead.
2. When you are creating a Web Application, use the website name for Public URL Ex: http://mywebsite.domain.com instead of the default, Application Server name (filled by default). We could not find a way to revert this.
3. Ensure to make appropriate DNS entries so that the web site is really internet facing. Your administrator may want to make entries in the Name server, to map the website name to the local load balancing web server, so that users (employees) within the domain need not go through internet.

 Hope this should be a good start. Good Luck! on your setup.