Instant hostname failover - continous pinging when machines switch?

Question

I'm new here, please bear with me.

I'm a trial period employee at a IT company which focuses on server solutions, failovers etc. I had a task to ping a machine through DNS, whenever machine shuts down the ping should continue (some sort of failover solution, hostname with multiple IPs like web pages and whatnot). I managed to accomplish that by having 2 IPs in DNS table in MS Server 2012 R2. When the machines switched there were dropped packets, and the whole transfer took about 30 seconds, but the task was done. Its was done in test environment, Im not deployed to do that in real situations

Now comes the tricky part - now I have to come up with an instant solution. When I ping a hostname (for example ping Test), when the first machine goes offline, the second machine should start pinging right away without any lost packets or at least reduce failover time to 5 seconds. So how can I make that work?

I have access on physical and virtual machines and servers, Mikrotik routers as well.

Every idea helps, there is no right method. I just need it to ping without interruptions when one machine fails. I tried to Google it, but with no success.

Answer 1

The easiest way to get something like this running is most likely keepalived. You have a "virtual" IP, and it fails over very quickly to another server.

I don't know if it's available for Windows, but you can move the IP failover into the router.

Answer 2

I found the solution myself. I used the Network loadbalancing feature in Server 2012 on all clients which I needed to work. Aslong the machine is running with the client the cluster IP is active and the pinging continues. When the machine is turned off, aslong there are other machine with the network loadbalance client up the cluster ip pings.