Problem: IIS farm should be load balanced using multiple ARRs. Ideally the ARRs work in an active/active failover cluster. However NLB and WSFC cause too much trouble (see https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ef47e67e-e145-4c84-830f-12c5f8877501/nlb-in-vmware-troubleshooting?forum=winservergen) in my setup, so that I do not want to use them, but a simple IP failover instead.

I did some research and found software like keepalived, ucarp, heartbeat, ... for Linux, but nothing similar for Windows Server 2012 R2? Or is an IP failover the wrong way, do you have a better alternative (hardware LB is not possible, I just got some VMs without possibility to configure the underlying network)?

I only found MyWindowsHeartbeat and MiniSFT, but I do not think, that these are very stable solutions comparable to the Linux "equivalents".

Problem: IIS farm should be load balanced using multiple ARRs. Ideally the ARRs work in an active/active failover cluster. However NLB and WSFC cause too much trouble (see https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/ef47e67e-e145-4c84-830f-12c5f8877501/nlb-in-vmware-troubleshooting?forum=winservergen) in my setup, so that I do not want to use them, but a simple IP failover instead.

I did some research and found software like keepalived, ucarp, heartbeat, ... for Linux, but nothing similar for Windows Server 2012 R2? Or is an IP failover the wrong way, do you have a better alternative (hardware LB is not possible, I just got some VMs without possibility to configure the underlying network)?

I only found MyWindowsHeartbeat and MiniSFT, but I do not think, that these are very stable solutions comparable to the Linux "equivalents".

In short: it should work reliably and well. Many people run Web Farms and failover never is an issue if hardware picked up properly.

In long: GO 100% LINUX! It would be much less pain for anybody :)

Hi chipper12,

I am not quite understand the description of IP failover instead, but the AAR load balance process is like this:

ARR is a proxy-based routing module that forwards HTTP requests to content servers based on HTTP headers, server variables, and load balance algorithms. You can deploy ARR in active/passive mode to achieve only high availability, or you can deploy ARR in active/active mode to achieve both high availability and scalability.

NLB makes routing decisions on the data level (layer 3); therefore, application-specific information, such as HTTP headers and server variables, cannot be used to provide application level based routing. Instead, you can use ARR and NLB in an HTTP-based routing and load balancing scenario. To configure HTTP-based routing and load balancing, you will need a 3-tier deployment architecture that includes the following:

The related KB:

NLB and ARR

http://forums.iis.net/t/1190317.aspx

Achieve High Availability and Scalability Using ARR and NLB

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee683895%28v=ws.10%29.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

Im glad to be of help to you!