At what point do you need to load balance office web apps?

Question

Ive been tasked with investigating and implementing an office web apps solution for my company and I was wondering if I could get some advice on something.

The company is fairly small, upper limit of 300 people. Maybe 2 thirds of that manage documents, but not all the time.

Microsoft suggests having a load balanced pair of OWA servers, but im wondering if thats necessary with a company this small.

Does anyone have any insight on whether or not in this case it should be load balanced or a single server? Is there a range of users that microsoft suggests farm size?

Thanks.

Answer 1

It really comes down to this: Are you load-balancing and doing high-availablity in SQL Server? Or do you solely rely on OWA rather than Office clients? If you are, then you might as well do load balancing in OWA.

In my opinion, OWA is an added convenience for end users, and if the server happens to go down for any reason, users (especially a size that small) can still edit the documents in the client.