Load Balancing in MS Dynamics CRM

In its infinite wisdom Microsoft decided to make my life harder by making it MS Dynamics CRM not work out of the box with a load balancer and I'm not talking about Microsoft software based network load balancing although it would apply too, if memory servers right, but a proper hardware based solution, which if again, memory serves me right, it's a Cisco 11506, but that is by the by.

In a normal load balancing situation, you would want a DNS entry for your load balancer's VIP and you would direct your clients to that VIP, so far so good. The problem is that there is a few pesky rows in the DeploymentProperties table in the MSCRM_CONFIG database

ADSdkRootDomain
ADWebApplicationRootDomain

The NvarCharColumn for these rows is, by default, set to the first server in a deployment, which is all well and good if you have a single server in your deployment, but the minute you add another server you are creating a single point of failure, because if the first server goes down, down goes your application. In actual fact it won't come down until the app pool gets recycled if I remember correctly. It will also refuse to start if the first server is down.

In the three+ years since we encountered this problem, it seems that this is all now clearly documented, I should've done a search in google before I wrote all this, oh well.

Note that some people have reported that this setting also needs changing, I guess it depends on whether or not you are using asynchronous plugins, which we don't.

AsyncSdkRootDomain