Fail Over for ADFS server

Question

Dear All,

I have installed secondary ADFS server, but while the primary ADFS server Down, I cannot access ADFS Service.
I can access ADFS service after I change DNS record to secondary server.
Do I have install NLB for ADFS? Please guide me to install NLB for ADFS server.

Regards,
Nana Sutisna

Answer 1

You need a load balancing mechanism. It could be NLB, but that's usually not recommended as it is sometimes hard to get it to work in some virtual environment and there are also some caveats (for example NLB doesn't know if the service is running or not, it just knows that the host is up).
The recommended way is to use a hardware load balancer.

You might be interrested to provide high availability by using Azure. You could have ADFS servers there (granted you already have DCs for example) and use Traffic Manager to handle the load balancing and fail over. See these:

• Deploying Active Directory Federation Services in Azure https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad-fs/deployment/how-to-connect-fed-azure-adfs
• High availability cross-geographic AD FS deployment in Azure with Azure Traffic Manager https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/identity/ad-fs/deployment/active-directory-adfs-in-azure-with-azure-traffic-manager