Load balancing Web Servers

Whats the best way to load balance Web Servers ? Do we do it round robin ?
Also what are some good load balancing softwares out there ? Are hardware
load balancers better ?

Re: Load balancing Web Servers

Hassan,
It all boils down to the application that you are trying to host. Let's take
an Classic ASP application that uses Sessions. In this case, a sticky
session with a Network Loadbalacer would help without having to change the
code. What happens is, the load balancer decides to send a new request to a
particular server based on load. All subsequent request from the same user
will be routed to the same server till it goes down. In which case, the user
would hit another server and the ASP session would be missing.

If your application handles sessions externally like options available in
ASP.NET etc, then you have an option to run the application using a round
robin fashion, where the servers are uniformaly utilized.

Regards,

Trevor Benedict
MCSD

"Hassan" wrote in message
news:eBQRQ5wMIHA.4308@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Whats the best way to load balance Web Servers ? Do we do it round robin ?
> Also what are some good load balancing softwares out there ? Are hardware
> load balancers better ?
>
>
>

Re: Load balancing Web Servers

"Hassan" wrote in message
news:eBQRQ5wMIHA.4308@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl...
> Whats the best way to load balance Web Servers ? Do we do it round robin ?
> Also what are some good load balancing softwares out there ? Are hardware
> load balancers better ?
>
>
>

Hi Hassan,

Mind this, whatever solution you choose, unless your session state is stored
in a persistent medium, such as a database, your loadbalancing is not
complete. Not any hardware solution or software (such as Windows Network
Loadbalancing, which is fine!) is sufficient because, when a session is in
memory, and the server or the application pool gets reset, sessions are
lost. This might cost you assets.
So if you use Classic ASP, I would advise
http://www.nieropwebconsult.nl/asp_session_manager.htm this is the most
scalable and compatible option for classic asp available (even for window
x64 edition).