Software to synchronise load balanced win2003 servers?
Discussion
OK, sorry in advance for the question! but i guess there are a few people on here who probably have some idea about the following.
At work we have two win 2003 servers which are load balanced; which means 2 things:
1) it's a pain in the bum to have to upload any changes twice
2) it's not just me uploading changes, we have non-techy people with things like contribute to change web pages.
so does anyone have a similar setup which uses a piece of software to keep the two machines in sync - it would probably be OK to have some lag between the two, as generally it's only content which is changed by users, and a lot of stuff is maintained in a DB so that isn't an issue.
I'm the developer btw, but i've got the responsibilty for looking into this a bit to try to resolve the fact that we have 2 sparkly new machines which we can't use 'cos someone forgot to get the people that did the hardware install to spec and supply a bit of software!
thanks in advance, CH
At work we have two win 2003 servers which are load balanced; which means 2 things:
1) it's a pain in the bum to have to upload any changes twice
2) it's not just me uploading changes, we have non-techy people with things like contribute to change web pages.
so does anyone have a similar setup which uses a piece of software to keep the two machines in sync - it would probably be OK to have some lag between the two, as generally it's only content which is changed by users, and a lot of stuff is maintained in a DB so that isn't an issue.
I'm the developer btw, but i've got the responsibilty for looking into this a bit to try to resolve the fact that we have 2 sparkly new machines which we can't use 'cos someone forgot to get the people that did the hardware install to spec and supply a bit of software!
thanks in advance, CH
Windows File Replication System should do it in theory but I (and more experienced techy bods) have had no luck in getting it to work.
You'll find the simplest solution (and one used by a surprising number of installations) is robocopy invoked from a scheduled task every few minutes.
You'll find the simplest solution (and one used by a surprising number of installations) is robocopy invoked from a scheduled task every few minutes.
ThatPhilBrettGuy said:
Well, as a developer you'd know that if the db is on both machines it is an issue.
What software runs on each box?
Ah sorry, didn't make that bit clear, it's a seperate DB server to the Web Servers - so there's no need to worry about complicated stuff like synching DBs. It just really needs to be at file level
The servers are both just Windows 2003 server (sp1), running IIS version 6.
Ta, CH
PetrolTed said:
Windows File Replication System should do it in theory but I (and more experienced techy bods) have had no luck in getting it to work.
You'll find the simplest solution (and one used by a surprising number of installations) is robocopy invoked from a scheduled task every few minutes.
Cheers Ted, it wouldn't be me setting up anything like this anyway, and I there is a small budget, so if it's a free thing we can use, we can spend the money on a consultant scratching their head (mental note to get a job rate and not hourly!).
dr bob said:
Well, as a developer you'd know that if the db is on both machines it is an issue.
What software runs on each box?
Ah sorry, didn't make that bit clear, it's a seperate DB server to the Web Servers - so there's no need to worry about complicated stuff like synching DBs. It just really needs to be at file level
The servers are both just Windows 2003 server (sp1), running IIS version 6.
Ta, CH
Cool. Well you could probably get away with xcopy running as a scheduled job, if there are no nasty rules needed as to what happens if the same file is editted on each server. Can't get any cheaper than free!
PetrolTed said:Yep, I've used that successfully in the past as well.
You'll find the simplest solution (and one used by a surprising number of installations) is robocopy invoked from a scheduled task every few minutes.
One thing that caught us out is that if you use robocopy to check the timestamp on the file, it's not all that fast. Depending on file size / number of files / speed of link between the source and destination, you can end up with one robocopy still running when the next scheduled one kicks off.
Might not be a problem for you, we only struggled when we had several thousand files in a folder, and a relatively slow link between Aberdeen and London.
Just something to bear in mind, if that won't affect you then it's a good solution.
Edit to add - is there one 'master', or do you need to replicate both ways?
>> Edited by jamieboy on Monday 20th February 09:23
Replication needs to be both ways, however, the machines are physically in the same rack - i guess that the timestamp it works off is the original update and not the robocopy update?
sorry - really not too hot on this side of things (although willing!), but it's the only way to move things forward.
CH
ps, thanks for all the helpful comments, will investigate them all this afternoon, after i've dealt with my monday morning whingers.
sorry - really not too hot on this side of things (although willing!), but it's the only way to move things forward.
CH
ps, thanks for all the helpful comments, will investigate them all this afternoon, after i've dealt with my monday morning whingers.
dr bob said:
Ah sorry, didn't make that bit clear, it's a seperate DB server to the Web Servers - so there's no need to worry about complicated stuff like synching DBs. It just really needs to be at file level
The servers are both just Windows 2003 server (sp1), running IIS version 6.
Ta, CH
So the stuff you're updating is just under the IIS web root directory then?
Could you not move the web content onto a NAS drive, mount it on both machines, and point both IIS instances at that? I've not used this on Widows/IIS, but seen it working on Solaris/Apache.
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