Setting up a Load Balanced Web Farm

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My employer has need to setup a Load Balanced Web Farm for some mission
critical ASP.NET Web Services and I was wondering if the only way to
accomplish this was to purchase Microsoft's ISA Server 2006 since that's the
only reference I have found on Microsoft's site in regards to this
requirement.

Thanks,

Chris

[bruce barker]

no. you have several options. you can do it the old fashioned way and
enter multiple ip addresses into dns. the most common way is with a
hardware switch (say bigip) that does the load balance.

on the web servers, you want to use sqlserver session state, as inproc
can not be used with a web farm (or garden). you need to manually config
the viewstate encryption keys

-- bruce (sqlwork.com)

Chris wrote:

My employer has need to setup a Load Balanced Web Farm for some mission
critical ASP.NET Web Services and I was wondering if the only way to
accomplish this was to purchase Microsoft's ISA Server 2006 since that's the
only reference I have found on Microsoft's site in regards to this
requirement.

Thanks,

Chris

[=?Utf-8?B?UGV0ZXIgQnJvbWJlcmcgW0MjIE1WUF0=?=]

No,
you can do it with the nlb service. Rick Strahl has a nice article on the
subject here:

http://www.west-wind.com/presentatio...indows2003.asp

As Bruce mentions, you have to do some configuration including making sure
machine keys are all the same, and the site id's in each IIS metabase are the
same if you want to use session / forms auth.
-- Peter
Site: http://www.eggheadcafe.com
UnBlog: http://petesbloggerama.blogspot.com
BlogMetaFinder(BETA): http://www.blogmetafinder.com

"Chris" wrote:

My employer has need to setup a Load Balanced Web Farm for some mission
critical ASP.NET Web Services and I was wondering if the only way to
accomplish this was to purchase Microsoft's ISA Server 2006 since that's the
only reference I have found on Microsoft's site in regards to this
requirement.

Thanks,

Chris