We would like to ensure minimal down time for our hosted software, which is .NET and SQL Server based. We would like to setup a multi-site cluster so we would have two servers at geographically dispersed locations. We don't need the whole server to be mirrored, just the IIS settings and directories and the SQL Server database. I have read up on Server 2008 R2 multi-site clustering but the Windows Solution relies on finding some third party tools to replicate the data across the server. I was hoping that someone could shed some light on an easy way to set this up.
2 Answers
IIS cannot be clusted. But you can use the Network Load Balancing feature to build a web farm of IIS for failover. For replicating data, you can use robocopy if you don't like some third party tools.
- Thanks sky100. Robocopy is a great option. Do you know of any tutorials that discuss setting up the IIS7 and SQL Server 2008 failover together?Dmitri Sunshine– Dmitri Sunshine2010-01-20 16:36:18 +00:00Commented Jan 20, 2010 at 16:36
- To pull off a multi site cluster with SQL you have to have a bridged subnet. Windows clustering does not require this but SQL does. As far as the third party tools you don't have much of a choice since you will have 2 different SANs involved and the data has to be up date to the block level if you need to fail over.Jason Cumberland– Jason Cumberland2011-09-09 16:11:47 +00:00Commented Sep 9, 2011 at 16:11
Microsoft has released an article describing IIS 7 failover configuration.
