I'm working on a solution where we will be setting up 40 virtual web servers on a single server using Windows 2008 w/ Hyper-V.
Unfortunately, we only have 3 free public IP addresses to use, so I need to have a basically a single public IP which would route a request to the appropriate server.
I'm thinking that I would have a web server running on the host that would run at say "web.company.com", then each virtual server could be a sub-domain, like "client1.web.company.com". Then, a front-end web server would proxy the request to the virtual web server for client1.
Is that a reasonable way to configure the system? If so, can IIS be used to do that proxying or would another open-source web server work better (apache, lighttpd, etc)?
Best Answer
This sounds weird. 40 VMs for 40 sites?
IIS can host multiple web sites per machine. Can you not have, say, 3 servers, and use IIS host headers to host 15 sites a piece? Or does each web application instance have to be that dedicated?
Regardless you will need to do some kind of reverse proxy if you want to share a single IP across 40 boxes. You will need to set up each host name in the reverse proxy so it knows to which box to send that host header...