Setting up web farm for DNN 6.2.6 CE with multiple file servers

Question

We are planning to convert our website which is running on single server to a web farm with two servers on Windows 2008 R2. I am afraid I haven't found lot of documentation on how to achieve this. Can any one please point me to the proper documentation for this. The one document I found is

http://www.datasprings.com/resources/articles-information/creating-a-webfarm-for-your-dotnetnuke-site

This one explains using single UNC share as file server but we are looking into to use every server in the web farm as file server (i.e. have dotnetnuke folder on all the server's local drive) since UNC share becomes single point of failure. So my questions are:

1. Can we do DNN web farm with multiple file servers, if so, how?

2. And also, how does the modules updates should be done? Does it need to be done on all the servers separately or does the DNN has any inbuilt mechanism for this or do we need to use DFS replication between the servers?

3. Also, we use heavy caching. Since we have to use file caching in the DNN CE web farms, how does the caching works with multiple file servers?

Also, please let me know any points or gotcha that I need be aware of. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The recommended way or doing a web farm for DNN is to use a single UNC share. Even with the paid editions of DNN that is the recommended approach.

Is it possible to do it any other way, yes, but there is nothing build into DNN to help you do so.

If you want to use multiple file servers you start running into issues with file based caching, module installations, etc.

Answer 2

Using UNC Share is best and easy to setup method to run DNN portal on webfarm. If you use single UNC share from all servers then possibly you do not get cache issue.

I had setup webfarm of DNN portal which was running on 4 web servers and 5th one was being used as file sever (UNC share) and DNN Database server and it was working quite well.

One more thing you should consider is that - Sessions. DNN itself do not make use of Session and session variables. But if you are using your own modules or third party modules using session then it will be good to implement Session State Server.