Rotate Servers in a Server Farm
Applies To: Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Vista
This topic describes how to rotate servers in your server farm by making the servers available or unavailable to receive incoming traffic. A server farm is a logical grouping of one or more servers. In a typical environment, the Application Request Routing (ARR) server is connected to one or more application servers where incoming requests are routed. You can use routing rules or configure properties that manage the behavior of ARR to determine how and where traffic is routed. For example, you can use the weighted round robin algorithm to load balance incoming requests evenly across multiple servers.
On the individual server level, the following actions are available:
Make Server Available — The server will appear available so that traffic can be routed to the server.
Make Server Unavailable Gracefully — The server will appear unavailable so that new traffic cannot be routed to the server. Pre-existing requests will complete successfully.
Make Server Unavailable Immediately — The server will appear unavailable so that new traffic cannot be routed to the server. Pre-existing requests are terminated immediately.
Disallow New Connections — The selected server will refuse new connections. Pre-existing requests will complete successfully. Requests from affinitized clients will continue to be routed to affinitized servers.
Before you can continue, you must have IIS 7 installed on a computer that is running Windows Server® 2008 or newer, ARR and its dependent modules, and a minimum of two application servers with working sites and applications. For information about how to create a server farm, see Define and Configure an ARR Server Farm.
To make servers available
Open IIS Manager.
In the Connections pane, expand the server node and then expand the Server Farms node. Select your server farm.
In the Server Farm pane, double-click Monitoring and Management.
On the Monitoring and Management page, select the server that you want to make available.
In the Actions pane, click Make Server Available.
In the confirmation dialog box, click Yes.
To make servers unavailable
Open IIS Manager.
In the Connections pane, expand the server node and then expand the Server Farms node. Select your server farm.
In the Server Farm pane, double-click Monitoring and Management.
On the Monitoring and Management page, select the server that you want to make unavailable.
In the Actions pane, select one of the following:
Make Server Unavailable Gracefully
Make Server Unavailable Immediately
Disallow New Connections
In the confirmation dialog box, click Yes.