George Mladenov wrote:
> This is exactly what I want and I was hoping that there is something built-
> in to do it. Sorry if it sound stupid, but would it be possible to open up
> an HTTP request to the second host directly if there is load balancing
> software installed.
Like I said, it depends on what you mean by "load balancing".
The classic examples which doesn't require (more) expensive software from
Microsoft is to use round-robin DNS, or a redirect system (i.e., you go to
www.foo.com and it redirects you to www6.foo.com). Obviously in either of
these scenarios, you could initiate connections to specific machines at
will, as they have visibly unique IP addresses (and maybe hostnames).
For example, here's what I get when I look up cnn.com:
C:\ >> nslookup cnn.com
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: cnn.com
Addresses: 207.25.71.20, 207.25.71.25, 207.25.71.29, 64.236.16.20
64.236.16.52, 64.236.16.84, 64.236.16.116, 207.25.71.5
There are (at least) 8 web servers back there. Subsequent requests order the
responses differently, so that requests are balanced across all servers (but
you can fall over to another one if the first one is down).
However, if you use Windows Load Balancing, my understanding is that the
multiple machines all appear as one large, single machine to the outside
world. In that scenario, I'm not sure how/if you could move the request to
another machine. In reality, you'd probably have to use another session data
scenario if using Microsoft's load balancing system. (BTW: I've never run
the MS load balancing stuff, so this is all hear-say to me, and I could very
well be extremely wrong :)
Brad
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