Microsoft Internet Information Services 7.0

Option 2: Hardware Load Balancer

Providing access to the IIS 7.0 group of servers and recognizing when a server has stopped responding to requests automatically requires a hardware load balancing solution that supports hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). This level of configuration adds complexity to the overall deployment of the IIS servers.

Hardware load balancers also add costs to the overall hosting solution. Two or more hardware load balancers are necessary; if only one is implemented, the hardware load balancer becomes the single point of failure. Because client connections are handled by specialized hardware, hardware load balancers tend to scale to handle more concurrent client sessions than software-based load balancers. Many hardware ...