MS Server 2003 -Web Ed. building a web server farm, need help

[mlchris2]

I have been asked by my development team to find out more information on a Web Server farm using MS Server 2003 Web Edition, because they want to institute this configuration in our environment.

I would like to how they conceptually work and how they load-balance, etc between the two servers.

Any links or other websites you can recommend would be great too.

thanks

Mark

 

[bradk50]

Load balancing is quite simple, you simple have x number of machines with the same content on them and use a loadbalancer to distribute traffic among them. Basically you set up a virtual IP(and put that in dns as

http://www.yourcompany.com)

on the device and tell it which IP's to ditribute the traffic behind it to. So a user hits the virtual IP(VIP) and the load balancer will then redirect them to one of your servers depending on your rules setup on it. It is completly transparent to both the user and the server.

Something to watch out for:
Session state, if you use session state you will have to make sure you keep track of it off the webserver or you will have to use sticky load balancing(where the same IP always gets sent to the same server) there are some drawbacks to sticky sessions that you would have to look into.

I have worked with these for years and the two I like the best are BigIP by F5(

http://www.f5networks.com/)

and Cisco CSS switches(formally arrowpoints)

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/contnetw/ps792/

I also work with coyotes and don't really like them, and really don't like the windows load balancing services(or whatever microsoft calls it)

You can't go wrong with either F5 or Cisco, and its really not anymore complicated then making sure you watch out for session state.