IIS 7 Web Farm High Availability and Redundancy using ARR, Network Load Balance and MySQL

IIS 7 has proven to be a solid web server that can be easy to manage yet powerful at the same time. In this post I wanted to show how easy it can beto set up a redundant load balanced scalable server farm using IIS 7 using Application Request Routing. This isn't intended to be a step by step guide but more a high level over view of what pieces you'll need and how to assemble them. The plan is to use 7 Windows 2008 R2 servers to accomplish this. With this configuration up to 3 servers can go down and the farm stay up and operational.

1 x AD Domain Controller
2 x ARR Controllers in NLB
2 x IIS Web servers
2 x MySQL DB Servers

Check out the post to go along with the video on my site:

[eazykiel]

good job! it helped me very much in the configuration of my setup ! merci !

[mplehmann]

This video was very helpful, and I was able to implement this myself in a dev environment. I have a few key questions for issues I ran into:

1) With the multiple ARR nodes it seems that you are unable to use the “monitoring and management” features (make server unavailable gracefully, make sever unavailable immediately, mark server as unhealthy, etc) because these settings do not replicated with the shared config. I believe they are all handled in memory as part of the w3wp.exe process.

2) we have a lot of websites (30-50). It seems like in order to take advantage of the health check/ failover features for each site, you need to setup a server farm per site. (This is not practical or usable for 30-50 sites through). I’ve set up a single farm with 2 severs, but I won’t be able to failover a single site if only that site is failing. If a single site fails that whole sever will be marked as unhealthy and all 30-50 sites will failover to the other sever.

Is this your experience with both of these questions? What are your thoughts? Thanks!

[WayneBarroncffcs]

Rob, hopefully, a quick question for you.
In the video, you have two ARR Servers with NLB and a single IP.

I have installed two ARR Servers
Installed NLB on both the servers.
I have set up the ARR-01 Server, with the Single IP. 192.168.2.22
And the ARR-02 Server also shares the same Single IP. 192.168.2.22

My question is this.
#1: Did I do the right thing having both ARR Servers with NLB installed on both, with both utilizing the same .22 IP Address?

#2: When routing to these ARR Servers, how do you send traffic to them?
Do I need two Routers, in order for the dual ARR Setup to work?
(If the answer is Yes, then I will have to get rid of the second one, as I only have a single Modem and Router in-line at the current moment.

Wayne

[WayneBarroncffcs]

Thank you.
Could you clarify rather this is a setup similar to what sites such as Facebook use?
Thanks for the video, it was very interesting and very helpful.

[rorymcmanus]

if you make changes on on Web1 will your content be replicated to Web2? if so how do you set it up