If your web server is starting to lose performance and resources are lacking, it may be time to implement a web farm. A web farm will pool sources and allow your web server to share its resources with another high powered machine. It can greatly increase web form performance and rid some of the end user frustration of timeouts and slow responses.
Network load balancing for web farm servers gives a virtual IP to your web servers. With proper configuration on the web server’s machine.config files, this allows your servers to pool resources. In addition, Windows 2003 brings a new Network Load Balancing Service to the Microsoft operating system. It also comes with a network balancing snap in that helps you manager your web farm.
Another advantage to a web farm with network load balancing for IIS is that if one server fails, your web farm will pick up where the other server has failed. You can remove the other web farm server without significantly harming your overall web services. If your web servers have a high volume of requests, this will ensure that your customers and employees can still work efficiently. Perhaps your users will see a slight decrease in performance, but at least your whole web services won’t be down.
When load balancing your application, you also need to remember to include the SQL server in your plans. If your database is not primed for a heavy load of multiple requests, then your bottleneck can quickly change from your web servers to your database server. You can also split your data farm to help with performance issues. Databases can take a heavy load especially in an environment where your web site has heavy traffic. Splitting resources in a database environment can help your servers’ resources and the redundancy can help maintain uptime for better efficiency.
Network load balancing across a web farm can greatly increase your web site’s performance. It can also be a better budgeted option. Instead of high cost machines, you can purchase several lower cost machines to share resources. This tiny change can better enhance your web farm’s performance. Web service performance and redundancy can greatly increase efficiency in both production and downtime moments. If you have a high priced web site and you rely on your web services for income, then having high quality load balancing can save you thousands, even millions, of dollars.