Windows Server 2003/2008 Server Replication/Mirroring

[Dom]

As is the norm for my job, I've slowly been dragged into a project that should technically be someone else's job to deal with, but because the project involves the word "web" in it somewhere (in this case, it's the "web" servers) I've been asked to look into server replication.

Currently, we have two Windows Server 2003 web servers that are accessible from the intertubes: one is the live server, and one is the "oh poo, our main server has gone down, quick get the backup hamsters running" server.

Obviously, in order for the "oh poo" server to be of any use, it has to be an exact copy of the live server, so that in the event of something going wrong, we can simply take the live server out, and replace it with the "oh poo" server, and everybody is none the wiser.

We do this at the moment, but what we've found is that our replication technique isn't that great. We've currently got Visual Basic scripts that run on a schedule (usually once a day) that copy website files, scheduled tasks, and other things from the live server to the "oh poo" server.

What it doesn't do is copy anything to do with IIS, such as the actual websites that are set up, the virtual directories, etc.

What I need to know is if Windows Server 2008 (and whatever version of IIS it comes with) has more flexibility when it comes to replication? If not, is there any tried and tested software out there that is basically the "industry standard" for maintaining recovery web servers?

Ideally, what we'd like is to have any changes to the live server immediately replicated to the "oh poo" server. So if I set up a new website in IIS on the live server, a new website is immediately set up on the "oh poo" server, with all of the settings and whatnot of the live site. Or if a user uses a website to upload a file to our server, that file is immediately replicated to the recovery server.

As I say, we only have limited replication going on at the moment, and that means we still have to take the time to replicate certain things on the recovery server that we've already taken time to do on the live server.

Our web servers are becoming more mission-critical to the business, so we'd like something nice and reliable.

TIA for your help.

[Steve Lampkins]

Didn't you ask this before?

[Dom]

Yeah I think I did on the .Net Mag forums, although the serious answers (if I actually got any) have been lost to the internet fairies. Also, at that point, I was just asking out of personal interest, but now it's an actual thing that needs doing.

[robwhizz]

Have you looked into clustering? It's not something I've ever tried, but I'm sure that IIS supports it.
You can cluster for redundancy so if a server falls over, the other will pick straight up.

Don't know too much about it as it's not something I've ever worked with, but this article came up in google with some links in it to get you started...
http://blogs.iis.net/thomad/archive/2009/10/27/iis7-and-failover-clustering.aspx
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/970759/

[Dom]

Ah, clustering... that name rings a bell, thanks. Now I know what to search for, that should help my endeavour. Thanks for the links, I'll take a look at those.

We're currently running IIS 6 on Server 2003, but I'm guessing we'll have to upgrade to 2008 to take advantage of the latest tech, which the Powers That Be have said is on the cards anyway. Might be able to kill two feathered fowls with one rock.

I wonder what version of IIS comes with 2008, and what version of .NET it runs. Version 4 I'm guessing, although our apps are only .NET 2.0.

[ih8mondays]

DFS might be a better (although not perfect) method of replicating the content, instead of the "daily" script.

[keri]

My company have 6 front end webservers running off a single storage server and a beastly DB server, both of which have live mirrors.

We mirror the file stores (god knows how many Gbs change all day) in a live fashion using SureSync, it works really well, not sure of costs though.

[Dom]

Great, thanks for the suggestions! I'd not heard of DFS or SureSync, but at this stage we're open to looking at anything that gets the job done reliably. And yeah, we're trying to move away from the daily scripts thing altogether.

[ih8mondays]

SureSync could be interesting.

We currently use ViceVersa on one of our websites.  It keeps getting file conflicts and then stops syncronising files between the two servers. Not sure if it's an error in the setup (by a 3rd party), or just not suitable for frequently changing large sites!

[keri]

We've not had a problem with SureSync, we have it mirroring two locations but we did used to run a third location back to our office in Swansea from the London data centre, that worked well too.

[Dom]

Well other things keep coming out the woodwork for me to deal with, but this is all great advice, so I'll definitely check out the recommendations.

It's be nice to have something to show the Powers That Be when they finally remember they've asked me to look into it.