Mirror Server IIS

Question

We are keeping two IIS servers, each has a copy of sites.Both having DNS entries. How can I switch to immediately upon a failure.

The objective is the secondary server should start running when the primary fails.

Answer 1

Are you sure that's the required solution for you? You are basically asking for a clustered solution for web hosting. Generally IIS is best left out of clustering and should utilise Network Load Balancing (NLB) instead.

With NLB you will have both servers up simultaneously and split the load between them. If one of them goes down the second will handle all the load until they are both back up.

As a side note, if you're using IIS 7 or above, have you considered using IIS Shared Configuration instead of manually configuring both servers?

Having said all that, here is also some useful information about IIS High Availability Clustering if it is still your wish to go down that route.

Answer 2

You can do this by Microsoft NLB, or IIS shared configuration as Lior mentioned. You can also use the "Application Request Routing" or a hardware load balancer but all depends on the environment, resources and your requirements.

Here are some resources:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj129384.aspx

http://pdfs.loadbalancer.org/Microsoft_IIS_Deployment_Guide.pdf

http://www.iis.net/learn/extensions/configuring-application-request-routing-%28arr%29/http-load-balancing-using-application-request-routing