Is it possible to simulate load balancers, and how much performance gain they provide?

Question

I have a website which runs on IIS (Asp.net application, some of them are in dotnetnuke also) and we are expecting higher numbers of traffic on some of the sites, so we are planning to add a load-balancer, but before going to do that, we just want to know is it worth to do that? So, I want to know if is it possible to simulate load balancer, and how much performance gain they provide?

Answer 1

Check this 2 links

http://www.west-wind.com/WebLog/posts/4229.aspx A few things that one always needs to remember when putting out a "site" that's on more than one server ("box")

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/LoadBalancingAndASPNET.aspx