Bulletproof Sessions for IIS Web Farm

Question

Good afternoon, all.

We're currently making the jump from one web server to two and in order to provide seamless failover to our users we need to do something about the session.

Currently, we're investigating three different methods.

1. Make use of a state server
2. Make use of SQL server
3. Chuck everything into hidden fields

I, personally, would like to see option number one go into place as we don't have a dedicated database for option number two and option number three seems like a messy hack.

The problem I currently face is that my manager is not happy with the single point of failure provided by a state server (our SQL server is replicated, so no troubles there).

Is there something that can be done about replicating the state server or some such?

Answer 1

It can be a pain, but I've decided to turn off Session and deal with the consequences. So far nothing insurmountable has come up.

Answer 2

After some more investigation we've decided to go with the StateServer option. We're still looking to see how to overcome the single point of failure on the StateServer and we've turned up two further avenues of investigation.

Our first option is to use a third party program to handle the sessions. The one we're looking at right now is called nCache: I think there's another called ScaleOut that we also may take a look at.

Option number two is to use session state paritioning and we're currently looking into this option as well: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/magazine/cc163730.aspx