Load balancing with websites using sessions

[ionoxx]

Alright.... I'm planning on launching a website that must run on 2 web servers (Windows 2003 Web Edition) and a DB server. Now, I need to have load balancing between the two web servers.

- Round robin DNS is out of the question... its just the best way. Even though, once you connect to the website you stay on the same server.

- Windows Network Load Balancing cannot be used because session data will not be passed over from one server to the other (or so i think).

- Windows Cluster service is not available on Web edition and Enterprise edition is too costly. (Standard edition is limited to 2 servers so... no)

What i'm thinking is putting a linux box or two in front. But Layer 4 Load balancing won't do it... session data will not be passed on.

Any suggestions???

 

[bsobel]

This is really more of a question of what is your backend implementation? ASP.NET supports SQL for session persistance, and I know there are a number of third party tools that will do session transfer from memory 'on demand'...

 

[ionoxx]

It's actually an ASP website. But there are parts of the administration websites that are PHP. They all work with MySQL DBs.

 

[Codewiz]

http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA027031/orenosp/index_en.html

Reverse Proxy that does load balancing and passes session data.