How to deploy to hardware load balanced farm
Hello. I searched through the last few years worth of topics and didn't find anything that addressed this issue.
I have an existing enterprise server configuration that needs a cms set up. I'm looking at SiteFinity with the load balancing addon to see if it will fit this need. The documentation page for setting up load balancing seems to skip over which parts are necessary in a hardware load balanced environment.
My requirements:
1- No single point of failure - there cannot be a single server in the configuration that will bring the entire system offline if it goes offline.
2- Each server in the farm must be stand alone and able to be excluded from the farm at any time without human intervention. Our load balancer will automatically remove a server from the rotation if it detects any issues with it, so the CMS needs to continue working as intended if/when this happens.
3- The servers in the farm may not be co-located and a network share between them may not be available.
Can SiteFinity work in a multi-server configuration as outlined above? We intend to use an existing Sql Server cluster for storage. File system storage for anything stored in the CMS is a deal killer.
Hi,
Sitefinity is flexible when it comes to the load balancing, either hardware or software. There are only a couple of requirements that need to be met:
Your questions:
1- No single point of failure - there cannot be a single server in the configuration that will bring the entire system offline if it goes offline. - Each instance of Sitefinity is functioning on its own. If one of the servers stops functioning for some reason, the rest will continue to operate normally. Since all servers are pointing to one Database, it needs to be protected with a fail safe backup
2- Each server in the farm must be stand alone and able to be excluded from the farm at any time without human intervention. Our load balancer will automatically remove a server from the rotation if it detects any issues with it, so the CMS needs to continue working as intended if/when this happens. - As I mentioned above, if one of the frontend server is removed from the rotation, the rest will continue to function normally.
3- The servers in the farm may not be co-located and a network share between them may not be available. - In this case, the files are on each separate server and should be kept in sync either by a third party tool or the configurations stored in the database.
The default provider stores the binary data in the database unless configured otherwise.