Question : configure failover web sites

Hi,

I have 5 online site - running good behind CISCO PIX 506E on one server. Now I am thinking to put a 2nd Server and want to configure it as the main WEB server for all 5 sites and the old server as failover. So if some body browse any site from 5 sites - It will first try to go to NEW SERVER and if that server doesnt responce it will go to OLD server. I hava all necessary resources except I dont know how to configure PIX for this scenerio.....

Answer : configure failover web sites

Hi, Cisco firewalls and Cisco routers are not designed for this type of failover.  The failover that is configurable in the PIX or Cisco routers is intended to failover from a primary firewall to a secondary firewall to protect from hardware failures on the firewall side.  This won't help protect you from a web server failure.

The hardware solution for this type of configuration would be a hardware load balancer (Cisco, Foundry, or others) that is at least layer 3.  These load balancers can often be very expensive; however, and if you truly want full redundancy it requires you to have redundancy on your firewalls, routers, switches, load balancers, network cards, servers, etc...

If all you truly want to accomplish is to failover from a primary web server to a backup web server then the Network Load Balancing service that is build into Windows 2003 is probably your best and least expensive option.  I have also heard of some 3rd party applications that let you setup load balancing similar to the MS NLB service that might offer some additional configuration options.

One word of warning about the NLB; however, is that unlike some more sophisticated solutions, it is not intelligent in any way.  This means that as long as the port is listening on the web server then traffic will attempt to go there.  As an example, if you shut down a specific site in IIS on that server, but port 80 is still listening then traffic will still get pushed to your primary server even if the website itself is not responsive.