Like all other reverse proxies, Microsoft’s free load balancing solution—Application Request Routing (ARR)—needs a way to connect to the sites on the actual web nodes. This week I cover different options available to managing the site bindings for the sites per server. If you have a single site, it’s straight forward, but once you start adding sites and servers, then you need to plan how to manage the binding sprawl.

Consider an environment using ARR which have 5 sites on 5 servers. That fairly small example has 25 separate sites on the web servers plus another 5 sites on the ARR load balancer. How will you handle the bindings between the ARR servers and web servers. You have three primary options. They are: 1) Host Headers, 2) Unique IP Addresses or 3) Unique ports. This week I cover the three methods and how to plan and configure each option. You can then decide which option works best for you.

This is now the 10th week in a mini-series on web farms, and the 35th week of the entire series. You can view past and future weeks in the section below.

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About Scott Forsyth

Senior Systems Engineer at ORCS Web, Inc (www.orcsweb.com) and co-founder of Vaasnet (www.vaasnet.com). Microsoft MVP for IIS. ASPInsider. Strengths are IIS, ASP.NET, DNS, Windows Server, and Hyper-V. This author has published 50 articles on DotNetSlackers. View other articles or the complete profile here.