I recently implemented an ASP.NET web farm (i.e. a set of load balanced servers running the same set of applications. This took forever to finally implement due to other priorities, but system stability was starting to suffer, so we went for it. The total process took about a week (at 70% time or so), as we had to retrofit the existing applications. It should take about a month to write it all up, but there’s a handy-dandy category for it should you want to read along.
The biggest complication involved user-uploaded content - we’ve got a few apps with pictures and audio files sent in by users (either the public or administrators). While some of the applications had been designed to put that stuff in the DB, it turns out that web applications use the database quite a bit, and converting the rest of the sites to store data as BLOBs seemed inefficient. We ended up still using the DB server, but as a simple media share using Windows file sharing instead of taxing poor ol’ MySql.
The first thing that had to change was our firewall. For reference, we needed to open tcp ports 135, 137, 139 and 445 between each server, and we also enabled ICMP traffic.
Next up: file permissions, part one of a thousand.
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