How do I get 2 servers to service one site????

[wacki]

I have a website i.e. www.mywebsite.com how do I set up 2 webservers (named server A and server B) to serve that url. I have windows 2000, windows XP in a dual boot configuration and I want to get it so that when someone types in the url I want it so that either A or B responds. Both A and B are exactly the same they have same chip, same software, same data and I just want to split the traffic up between both of the servers evenly.

 

[goldboyd]

The easiest way would be to setup roundrobin dns. Just add multiple A records for each IP. Granted this isn't the best way, as if one server goes down, it won't be automatically forwarded to the second server, and you can't weight one server more than the other, but it will definately split the load.

 

[Garion]

Round robin DNS is the easiest and cheapest (free) way to do it. But it's a pretty poor solution. If one web server goes down, you're pretty much toast - Every other request will get through, which means that really no pages will load.

To do it right, you need some kind of load balancer. There are software ones, which come with some flavors of Windows 2000 Server and there are distributions Linux.

Most big sites use dedicated hardware load balancers like F5's, Cisco LocalDirectors / CSS1000's, etc. Much higher performance.

XP or Win2K Pro is, in general, NOT a very good webserver. From my understanding, there are concurrent connection limits that will keep you from going very far.

If you just want to be able to switch between the machines, get a route that does NAT then adjust the port mapping tables whenever you want to switch servers.

- G

 

[payjo]

Is this just one machine? Becuz if it is then both win2k and xp will have the same ip. With that in mind as long as you have set up the dns server to point to your ip then it really doesn't matter whether you are running win2k or xp just as long as there is a web server set up on each machine.