Deploying IIS Cluster

[MadanB]

Hi All,

I’m in the process of creating a web cluster and I have to use Server 2008 to do it. Our hardware is as follows;

Processor: Dual Quad Core Xeon E5420 Processor2x6MB Cache, 2.5GHz, 1333MHz FSB, PE2950
Memory: 32GB 667MHz (8x4GB), Dual Ranked DIMMs
Hard drives: 3 x 1TB 15K RPM
RAID Controller: PERC6i
NIC: Intel PRO 1000PT Dual Port 1GbE NIC, PCIe-4

I was planning on putting the quorum on a SAN and keep the web servers in a CCR mode. I have a similar setup for our Exchange cluster but I’m not sure if this is the best route to take for a web server cluster. We’re trying to ensure that client data is located in only one spot and the servers would read data to and fro accordingly. The purpose of these servers is to always have our customer facing apps as 100% UP-UP, this is something we have achieved on our Exchange 2007 side so it’s a fair assumption we can achieve the same state for IIS. I plan on using IIS in a Shared Config setup and point the 3 web servers to that share, aka the SAN. I also have some alteon-180’s if I choose to go the hardware route for NLB.

I have rare opportunity to build this thing correctly from the ground up so any suggestions are more than welcomed!

Thanks in advance!

 

[58sniper]

CCR doesn't have data in one place. It has it in two. And last I checked, CCR is only for Exchange.

You'd be better off using multiple webservers in a NLB cluster.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[kmcferrin]

CCR is only for Exchange.

Your options are either using Windows Load Balancing Services to load balance between two identical servers that you keep in sync, use some sort of hardware solution (Cisco CSS, for example) that does load balancing between two identically configured servers, or you can try to put together a Windows Failover Cluster with IIS being the clustered application. Options #1 and #2 are far more common and the recommended solution, but option #3 can be done. In fact. Microsoft recently released a KB article explaining exactly how to configure IIS 7 as a failover cluster service:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970759

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