Converting single IIS server to highly available?

[jingledell]

Hey there,

I'd like to introduce myself to the group and also ask a question that I must answer soon due to a client's demands:

Client is a small business that has a local single IIS server which takes orders online for their business. They would like to have a highly available, redundant system.

The IIS installation must remain onsite - it is attached to an AS400 ordering system.

What would be the best way to make the site highly available? Thanks for any guidance here.

 

[itsp1965]

There are a few ways to enable redundancy in an IIS environment but it all depends on how much your client is willing to spend or do. A few things off the top of my head;

- Your webservers need to be robust in terms of hardware ie
Disk RAID, NIC redundancy, Link redundancy.
- Use Multiple IIS servers performing round-robin DNS (ie different hosts/diff IPs same alias ex)

http://www.yourbiness.com

This can be either performed using redundant hardware/ or through virtual machines (although more h/w better redundancy)
- Redundant ISP links. Your webserver is useless if your connection to the internet is down. Access to another ISP is helpful when things go awry
- Besides redundancy at the webserver level you need to consider the AS/400 which I am assuming serves as the data backend
- Take into consideration security. How well is the web servers protected? Is there a firewall, antivirus, Host Intrusion Detection, OS security

This is just the basics, I am sure others can cover what I have left off. Hope this helps.