Enabling Common Storage for ASP.NET Session State

  • Article

Applies To: Windows Server 2003, Windows Server 2003 with SP1

ASP.NET session state lets you share client session data across all of the Web servers in a Web farm or across different worker processes or worker process instances on a single Web server. Clients can access different servers in the Web farm across multiple requests and still have full access to session data.

You can enable common storage for ASP.NET session state by performing the following steps:

  1. Select the method for maintaining and storing ASP.NET session state.

  2. If you decided to maintain session state with the ASP.NET state service, configure out-of-process session state with the ASP.NET state service.

  3. If you decided to maintain session state with SQL Server, configure out-of-process session state with SQL Server.

  4. Configure the encryption and validation keys.

  5. Configure ASP.NET to use the session state method that you selected in Step 1.

  6. Secure the ASP.NET session state connection string in the registry.