I'm trying to setup a web farm using MS WFF and NLB between three servers. It's not that we need more speed, but rather the store has gone from "we have a store too..." to "Oh, this is amazing... make sure it doesn't go off line". It failed for a week and cost some serious money due to a WSI record set deleting a large block of data in error.
So we've purchased multiple machines, configured them with NLB, are using WFF 2.0 to sync up the websites. But I can't seem to find the missing pieces to make it work better. It is not as fast as the stand alone server (just a little slower), but perhaps the most notable is a very long delay getting the first page for a new web client. Something like 10 seconds before it starts to load the page. After the first page, it rips along. Our goal is 1.5 second response time, currently it averages 2.7 seconds. We plan on moving the web farm into a data center after we get the bugs worked out.
We want the ability for stateful transition if one server goes off line. Seems that there needs to be a special setup for that using a SQL server to control it, but I cannot locate information about how to set that up exactly.
We also have to deal with encrypting the config.web file on multiple machines and the certificate used to do so. In the testing environment, we are not doing that. There is an article on how to do that.
Also what is the deal with Web gardens? Would they improve performance? Why increase the number of process from 1 to a higher number? And what should that number be? If increasing the worker processes, what needs to be done to make them operate correctly in a webfarm?
Is there a good document, or set of threads to read on configuring a web farm for ADNSF? The servers are all 2008R2, NLB multicast with multiple nics, ADNSF is 8.0.1.2 I believe the NLB set is working okay, not sure how to tell if it isn't. I can add or drop servers from the NLB and they seem to take load just fine once the connection is started.
Any thoughts on this topic?