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I have two servers that I would like to use to load balance an application. Ideally, but not a requirement, I could load balance based on URL. But based on my research, that is not something that is done much.

My plan was to use CloudFlare's dns services for failover. More importantly that high availability, is the performance increase.

Is there a good way to do this without 3 servers?

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You can use Microsoft Network Load Balancing. It requires only two servers.

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  • Amazed that this perfectly correct answer with a reference got downvoted without explanation.
    – ErikE
    Apr 20, 2018 at 4:12
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You could install a load balancer such as Perlbal on one of the servers and pass off requests to the other based on URL or on a round robin basis as required but the bottle neck may very quickly become the server with Perlbal- typically you would use three servers in this situation.

You say that you seek performance over redundancy; the more efficient way of doing this (depending on your hardware, traffic and application) may be to use one server as the HTTP server and the other as a HTTP accelerator with something like Varnish.

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  • Thank you for your reply. As a Microsoft shop, is there a Microsoft way to do this?
    – bladefist
    Aug 24, 2015 at 2:12
  • If you want to stick with Microsoft and pass off requests based on URL as you described above, I think this should work for you iis.net/downloads/microsoft/application-request-routing
    – minus8
    Aug 24, 2015 at 13:47
  • I think ARR requires 3 servers, unless I misunderstood something.
    – bladefist
    Aug 24, 2015 at 15:37
  • I've never tried to run something like this on 2 servers but I don't imagine that's the case. You can set a backend to be anywhere you like as long as you have an IP or FQDN that points to the site.
    – minus8
    Aug 24, 2015 at 16:10

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