First Time with Multiple Servers... Guidance Needed

Greetings all. Here's my deal...

I have 5 IIS servers that are appearantly load balanced (by my sys
admin). I am after a 'best practice' plan here. In IIS, should I set
up all of my websites home directories on a network'd drive (so that I
do not have to copy each of my site's files to 5 different locations/
servers? Or should I create those home directories locally on each
servers drive so that I would have 5 identical environments?

I'm a guy who has gone from a one server world to one with actuall
redundancy.

Many Thanks
Joe

Re: First Time with Multiple Servers... Guidance Needed

On Oct 16, 10:21 am, "josephweiss@work..."
wrote:
> Greetings all. Here's my deal...
>
> I have 5 IIS servers that are appearantly load balanced (by my sys
> admin). I am after a 'best practice' plan here. In IIS, should I set
> up all of my websites home directories on a network'd drive (so that I
> do not have to copy each of my site's files to 5 different locations/
> servers? Or should I create those home directories locally on each
> servers drive so that I would have 5 identical environments?
>
> I'm a guy who has gone from a one server world to one with actuall
> redundancy.
>
> Many Thanks
> Joe



"Best Practice" often has to be balanced with "available funds",
"available personel", and "acceptable performance"...

For example, having five copies of the same data makes data
synchronization a headache, but if one hard drive fails the other four
servers keep running. Meanwhile, a shared network drive removes data
synchronization issues but becomes a single point of failure such that
a single hard drive failure brings down all five servers and destroys
the "scale out" benefit of load balancing.

You can address the single point of failure by RAID'ing the hard
drives or load balance the network file servers, but that costs more
money, electricity, and hardware/software system than having five
copies to synchronize. And as you consolidate five server's worth of
hard drive access onto fewer hard drive spindles of a shared resource,
increasing concurrency and context switching (which can drain
performance).

This leads to requiring better network file server hardware/software,
which needs more money and personel to configure/maintain... etc.

And the discussion goes on and on as one tries to find the right
balance between "Best Practice", "Money", "Performance", and
"Personel" to maintain the setup for a given organization.


//David
http://w3-4u.blogspot.com
http://blogs.msdn.com/David.Wang
//