title: IIS 7.5 Load Balancing--do Sessions stick to the originating server?
body: <p>Apologies if there is an answer already out here but I've looked at over 2 dozen threads and can't find the specific answer.</p>
  
  <p>So, for our ASP.NET (2.0) application, our infrastructure team set up a load balancer machine that has two IIS 7.5 servers.
  We have a network file server where the single copy of the application files reside.   I know very little about the inner workings of load-balancing and even IIS in general.</p>
  
  <p>My question is regarding sessions. I guess I'm wondering if the 'balancing' part is based on sessions or on individual page requests.</p>
  
  <p>For example, when a user first logs in to the site, he's authenticated (forms), but then while he navigates around from page to page--does IIS 7.5 automatically "lock him in" to the particular server that first logged him in and authenticated him, or could his page requests alternate from one server to the next?</p>
  
  <p>If the requests do indeed alternate, what problems might I face? I've read a bit about duplicating the MachineKey, but we have done nothing in web.config regarding MachineKey--it does not exist there at all.</p>
  
  <p>I will add that we are not experiencing any issues (that we know of anyway) regarding authentication, session objects, etc. - the site is working very well, the question is more academic, and I just want to make sure I'm not missing something that may bite me down the road.   </p>
  
  <p>Thanks,
  Jim</p>