DNS / IIS Failover

[Wayne Jolley]

I have two IIS 6.0 servers which operate a Web Interface for a Citrix farm.
One is based at the main production site and one is based at the DR site.
The DR server needs to be able to act as a failover for the first - but I
cannot use clustering or load balancing.

The failover to the redundant DR system needs to be as seamless as possible.

Am I right in thinking this cannot be done purely in DNS??

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to do this?

Thanks

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

It is possible to arrange something in DNS to do this, though it isn't really designed for the job. If you set the TTL very low you
can achieve a failover within a minute or two - shorter than this really calls for some type of hardware solution.

There is a third-party product www.simplefailover.com which uses DNS to effect failover, and is probably a better choice than
writing your own scripts, though that is certainly possible.

Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.

 

[Wayne Jolley]

Thanks Steve.

W.

It is possible to arrange something in DNS to do this, though it isn't
really designed for the job. If you set the TTL very low you can achieve a
failover within a minute or two - shorter than this really calls for some
type of hardware solution.

There is a third-party product www.simplefailover.com which uses DNS to
effect failover, and is probably a better choice than writing your own
scripts, though that is certainly possible.

Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.