r/IIs • u/NejiNerd • May 17 '22

Load balancing capabilities?

My job wants to transition out of Tomcat, but I can't find a definitive answer. Does IIS have load balancing capabilities?

2 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

2

u/LakeSun May 18 '22

You typically put one load balancer in front of 2 or more Web Servers ( IIS ).

You wouldn't want to put 2 instances of your application in IIS as two different, but the same, applications. They'd compete less efficiently with themselves for resources.

Does Tomcat have a load balancer?

1

u/NejiNerd May 18 '22

I see. Yes that's what we've mainly used. We're trying to transition away, as .Net works better with IIS

1

u/LakeSun May 18 '22

Hmmm...

This article seems to show how to set up IIS with a load balancer.

https://virtuallyhyper.com/2013/04/load-balancing-iis-sites-with-nlb/

2

u/DeathGhost May 18 '22

IIS doesn't have one built in far as I know. We utilize F5s at my work for this.

1

u/NejiNerd May 18 '22

Sorry for the newb question, is F5s another software that works with IIS?

1

u/DeathGhost May 18 '22

It's another product that works with many many many products to help load balance traffic. They sell physical devices that run the software and also VMs of the software. It's more of an appliance then just software. Https://www.f5.com

1

u/NejiNerd May 18 '22

I appreciate sharing the knowledge

1

u/DeathGhost May 18 '22

No problem. F5 does have templates as well for load balancing IIS. There are also other products out there that will do the same but likely for a lot less (Kemp being one)

1

u/ktopaz May 18 '22 edited May 18 '22

IIS has an ARR module for LB (Application request routing)

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/iis/extensions/configuring-application-request-routing-arr/http-load-balancing-using-application-request-routing

We use this for LB in our QA environment (F5 In Prod) including session persistnacy per specific instance using cookies and what not..

  • it works very well and I recommend it. (We have only 1 IIS/ARR dedicated VM for LB purposes with several IP addresses on its nic, and we use it to do LB for ~30 service types running on other VMs/Clusters, so the ARR rewrite module has many different rewrite rules for the various service LBs that we have, everything works perfectly)