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Load Balancing and CDN

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Morten Bengtson
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Posted on 01/10/2014 14:38:55

From the release notes of DW 8.5:

For large scale solutions we now support Content Delivery Network and Load Balancing for improved scalability.

 

Do you have some more detailed information about this? I'm very interested in knowing more about the load balancing part.

How do you set up load balancing? Who does what? Does this require a specific DW license?

Are there any special requirements that developers should be aware of?


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Nicolai Høeg Pedersen
Posted on 02/10/2014 09:41:39
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Hi Morten

We are still working on the documentation, but here are some answers

  1. For setup, see below
  2. You need to do this with the hosting provider. Hostnordic knows what to do
  3. Yes, it requires a license - talk to your account manager.
  4. Using a CDN is a setting in MC, Web & Http, CDN. You enter a cdn host, and all static ressources will be redirected to that host using the same structure. You have to ensure your self, that the ressources are in sync with the file manager.

Using Ecommerce with our current application in NLB environment, there will be a latency on updating some information from one server to another. I.e. which groups a product is member of is cached and Dynamicweb does not have a notification system across the servers. So there will be a latency. If servers are updated with new product information only during the night, this is not an issue.

So it can be setup using the below described scenario:

Roles needed for the cluster, Windows 2012 & SQL Server 2012 or 2014

  • One Application Request Routing (ARR) server for load balancing
    • Setup using Round Robin in a “Shared network content infrastructure”
  • Two or more web servers. These servers requires to install IIS web server and the IIS modules required to support Dynamicweb.
  • One file server for content and configuration sharing. Set up this server with shared folders for /Files. Dynamicweb Application could also be located on this one, but is recommended to have a copy on each webserver.
  • One Database server, shared between each of the webservers. Optional: Could be a SQL Cluster if redundancy is also required on the SQL.
  • OPTIONAL One additional webserver could be added to the cluster for CDN purposes. In the ARR it can be setup to serve static files like *.css, *.js, *.jpg, *.png etc. And even GetImage.ashx requests. In this way, http connections for one visitor is distributed on more servers improving response times.

One of the webservers in the cluster, call it NODE A, will be the “Master” server. This should be the servere where all administration of the website is handled. I.e. give it a http://admin.domain.com hostheader that will not be caught by the NLB but always goes to the NODA A server. If there is a big need for using the backend, an additional webserver role can be added to the cluster for only admin purposes. This can be setup in the ARR. 

On each of the webservers, Dynamicweb is installed as described in the installation guide. /Files will use a UNC path instead of a local path going to the shared fileserver. Alternatively the webservers can have local c-drive for the Windows installation and another drive pointing to a SAN/NAS or equivalent so that all webservers in the cluster are using the same disk system in that way. That will give better IO performance over the UNC option.

This is as far as I can go in describing the setup. Your hosting provider should handle the actual setup.

BR Nicolai

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Morten Bengtson
Posted on 02/10/2014 09:58:20
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Thanks, I hope that we will get a chance to try this setup soon :)

 

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