In chapter 14 you began using Application Request Routing (ARR) as the load balancer for your IIS web servers. Imagine what would happen if the ARR server went offline. You’d lose the entire load balance, and customers wouldn’t be able to access any websites. Protecting ARR from failure is just as important as protecting your websites.
In this very short chapter you’ll see how using Microsoft NLB is a great solution for protecting your ARR load balancers in case one should fail. You already have almost all the information you need to make this work from chapters 13 and 14. In this chapter I help you tie it together.
This is a short chapter, but don’t underestimate its importance. If you lose your ARR server, the entire web farm fails. You need to protect your ARR server and provide failover capabilities.
In this chapter I describe the concept by using Microsoft NLB to load balance two ARR servers. If you want to follow along with the Try It Nows, you’ll need to build another VM for the new ARR server and join it to your domain. You can do that now or read the chapter to get the concept and wait until the lab.