Exposing multiple IIS web applications using single domain url using F5

Question

We have about 50+ small ASP.Net web applications each with their own domain name and web servers.

We have consolidated them into 3 web servers as now, and they continue to have their own IIS web site + app pool + domain name (using host headers) + a SAN cert, load balanced using F5.

We will deploy 10+ new ASP.Net applications into the same infra soon. To scale the model we would like to have a single domain name like https://apps.mycompany.com/ and serve each application using the following URL scheme:

• https://apps.mycompany.com/app1 for app1
• https://apps.mycompany.com/app2 for app2
• .
• .
• https://apps.mycompany.com/appN for appN

We use IIS (web server) and F5(load balancer). I would like to know what is most efficient + scalable way to achieve this?

Answer 1

I would set up each application as a Web Application under one IIS site. You can still keep separate directories and separate application pools, but they become nested as (aliased) subdirectories under the one site.

Use IIS Shared Configuration and DFS Replication (or some other shared storage system for web files) to keep your ASP.NET application files in sync between all three servers.

The F5 load balancer can be configured to route traffic between the three servers, now that they all have the same configuration and data.

This gives you an efficiently-managed, fault-tolerant, performant web server farm with minimal effort on the part of the administrator.