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NLB vs ISA Server Farm Questions - 6.Jun.2008 9:57:05 AM

RobEdmiston

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Joined: 6.Jun.2008
Status: offline

My employer is discussing plans for an Internet Redesign. Along with this, our public website, which only has one server (IIS) currently, will be adding a second server for redundancy. We also have two IIS servers that are paired via NLB for various external applications including web services. We have yet another server that has about 20 sites that all redirect to various subwebs on our public web site. All of these servers are on our internal LAN. The NLB pair and the public website are serviced by one ISA 2004 server. The ISA server utilizes only one NIC and is out in the DMZ hanging off of a firewall.

Here are my personal opinions of what we need to do. I feel that money is an object because prior to my arrival here F5 load balancing was nixed due to cost.

My employer has about 5,000 employees but this scenario is for a public web presence that gets approximately 2 million hits (not visits) per month. I am not sure whether we will gain anything by using ISA 2006 Enterprise over Standard. We will be adding some applications that process credit card transactions. Our public web presence will undoubtedly be growing. Enterprise costs 4 x's as mush as Standard though.

First Preference
I feel that the best scenario is to utilize two ISA 2006 (Standard or enterprise) servers and use those for all web publishing. Do away with all NLB on internal IIS servers and set up server farms in ISA. Do away with all redirects and perform that function on ISA.

Second Preference
(If ISA 2006 Enterprise is used) Same as first preference only utilize just one ISA 2006 enterprise server in case cost is an issue. We could eventually add a second ISA server and then pair them up via NLB when funds become available.

Thanks in advance.

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RE: NLB vs ISA Server Farm Questions - 6.Jun.2008 12:33:18 PM

Jason Jones

Posts: 2140
Joined: 30.Jul.2002
From: United Kingdom
Status: offline

Based upon your company profile and usage, I would agree with option 1 being the best option, but only if you can afford to use two EE ISAs with NLB. SE is not supported with NLB so you would need to add some form of hardware load balancer to share traffic between two SE ISAs (not ideal as you stated).

If you cannot afford two servers now, then using EE with a single server is a good idea as this provides some scalability for the future and adding a second node is very easy to do, whereas moving from SE to EE is quite painful.

If you cannot afford EE at all, then I am not sure how two SE servers will help you unless you look at external balancing due to NLB supportability.

Another tip is to purchase servers with less physcial CPUs but more cores as ISA is licensed per physical CPU - hence a single quad core CPU ISA is half the cost of a two CPU single core CPU ISA in terms of EE licensing

Be aware that if you remove NLB from the web servers, you will need to publish these servers internally as well, otherwise internal access will not benefit from the load balancing and failover provided by ISA web pubs load balancing. If this is not acceptable, then just leave NLB on the web servers and still use ISA web pubs load balancing but use the dedicated IP addresses in the publishing rules as opposed to the VIPs to gain the application availability awareness of ISA. Best of both worlds?? - kinda

Cheers

JJ

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Jason Jones (MVP)

Silversands Limited http://www.silversands.co.uk
My Blog: http://blog.msfirewall.org.uk/

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(in reply to RobEdmiston)

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