ARR Tricks to Share with Web Server-Week 37

You can find this week’s video here.

This video covers two specific tricks to allow the Application Request Routing (ARR) and Web roles to share the same server. This is useful if you have multiple servers and can't setup dedicated servers for ARR, or even if you want to leverage ARR's functionality on the same server as the website.

In recent weeks we’ve been looking at Application Request Routing (ARR) and how to use it in your environment. Since it is a service that lives on a Windows server, it is possible to have the ARR role on the same server(s) as the web role.

My recommendation is to give dedicated servers to the ARR role if possible. The two reasons why I recommend this is for 1) troubleshooting reasons since it’s a bit more difficult to troubleshoot URL Rewrite rules when both roles are on the same server and 2) to protect the ARR servers (very low failure rate + low performance requirements) from the web servers (higher failure rate + higher performance requirements).

However, there are still valid reasons to collapse the two roles in a single server, or into multiple ARR+WEB servers. This video discusses this option and shows two tricks on how to do this successfully.

This is now the 12th week in a mini-series on web farms, and the 37th week of the entire series. You can view past and future weeks here: http://dotnetslackers.com/projects/LearnIIS7/

You can find this week’s video here.