Web Farm with a Firewall

  • Article

 

The following figure illustrates a Web farm scenario.

Front-end and back-end topology in a Web farm

Network load balancing on Front-end servers

Scenario

A corporation is deploying Outlook Web Access to 200,000 users. The goal is to have a single namespace (for example, https://mail) in which users can reach their mailboxes. Additionally, for performance reasons, the corporation wants to avoid having a bottleneck at the front-end server or a single point-of-failure, so they want to spread the load over multiple front-end servers by using Network Load Balancing (NLB). This scenario is referred to as a "Web Farm."

Note

Although this is the only scenario that depicts NLB, you can use NLB to distribute load among front-end servers in any of the scenarios described in this guide.

Setup Instructions

For detailed setup instructions, see How to Set Up a Front-End and Back-End Topology with a Web Farm Behind a Firewall.

Discussion

For information about how to set up Network Load Balancing, see the Windows online documentation. Configuring Exchange on the front-end servers does not require any special steps.

Issues

As previously mentioned, the load-balancing solution you use should ensure that each user is always sent to the same front-end server for the duration of a session.