IIS7 and ARR and WCF... Can we load balance our app servers?

Question

Perhaps I have the wrong product in mind for our needs -- but I want to know if I can use Application Request Routing (ARR) in IIS7 to load balance requests for our application tier.

We have a farm of web servers. Each will be running our MVC web application. We load balance these servers through our web application firewall and load balancing appliances. In turn, they will be make WCF calls to our application servers. It's these calls that I want to use ARR to manage.

However, after looking at ARR, it seems like it's all about rewriting URLs coming from the client. But that's not how our situation works. If a user browses to www.myapp.com/home/index, we will in turn be making WCF calls to services configured in the web.config to say myappservice.foo.local/home/GetInfo.

How do I configure for this scenario, or am I looking at the wrong product?

Answer 1

I am not really sure to understand your scenario, but if i understand correctly, I think you would be able to call your WCF sevice. If you dont need to keep the session on your call, just uncheck the client affinity checkbox in server affinity configuration.

Configure your load balance to Round Robin, or Least response time in the load balance interface and your request will suppose to be load balance.

If you got more that one ARR server, i suggest you to disable Shared configuration on your ARR, we get some problem with this features on the ARR server.