redundancy / load balancing on 2 unmanaged dedicated Windows-based servers

Question

We normally host our dedicated servers in an unmanaged data centre, i.e we just purchase the server and we can manage it ourselves via remote desktop connection. We cannot install / configure any hardware in the data centre.

Recently, we are looking into setting up redundancy for a hosted website, both for redundancy and also for load-balancing reasons. Is this possible to be done, if we only have access to the two servers via RDP? If it is, any guidelines on where to start? Both servers have different IPs obviously. Imagine I have one domain - www.test-redundancy.com. The domain can only point to one IP as far as I know, or round-robin but that wouldn't solve the issue if one server fails. Ideally, I would like it such that requests are spread onto both servers, and if one server fails, all requests are sent to the remaining server.

Is this possible? I am new to this area, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 06 '13 at 11:28

1

You can use Load Balancer like Nginx , Haproxy in front of your Windows Servers . Also Windows Server can be load balanced using inbuild NLB service (Network Load Balancer).

answered Aug 06 '13 at 11:28

Abhishek Anand Amralkar

1,979
12
16

And where would the domain A record point to (IP Address)? – Karl Cassar Aug 06 '13 at 13:38
It would point to the load balancer. – joeqwerty Aug 06 '13 at 14:58
@joeqwerty As mentioned, this an unmanaged data centre and they only provide the servers, and no additional hardware / help. We cannot install any hardware load balancer. Is this possible? – Karl Cassar Aug 08 '13 at 09:01
Haproxy and Nginx is software loadbalancers. – Abhishek Anand Amralkar Aug 08 '13 at 09:22

redundancy / load balancing on 2 unmanaged dedicated Windows-based servers

1 Answers1