OWA Load Balanced FE's

[Amanda_H_]

I'm looking for a how-to for setting up load-balanced FE's for our EV/OWA. Currently we have Exchange 2003/OWA 2003/EV6sp2, 8 back-end Exchange (none of them clustered) and one front-end Exchange. We want to add 1 more front-end Exchange and load-balance them. I can't find a good document anywhere. Any suggestions?

[Micah_Wyenn]

Usually the best way to do this is via a hardware blackbox that takes the incoming connection and has a bunch of policy related choices to push to the appropriate backend. I won't name vendors, but a google search will find plenty of them.

As far as EV is concerned, all you need to do is install the FE ext on both servers, and you're good to go. The problem then becomes one of pure networking happiness.

Good luck.

micah

[Brian_Day]

As Micah said a network based solution is your best bet. Point your firewall (assuming you have one) that protects OWA to a Virtual IP that on the backend points to both of your FE servers. You should be good to go at that point as long as both FEs are configured the same. :)

[Micah_Wyenn]

*bow*

yeah, and beware cache engines as well. They tend to fubar requests to the backends. So if your IP forwarder claims to do WAN acceleration, be cautious and watch for issues. If you find'm, just put in an exclusion for anything going to the backend EV servers. That usually fixes it.

micah