I've been playing around with the 2010 beta for a couple of weeks, experimenting with topology options etc. I think I've got myself totally confused as to how it works hence if there's any SP experts out there that can explain things in simple terms for me I'd appreciate it!
I want to setup a farm with 3 servers providing the content & MySites. I presume that the way to do this is to load balance or DNS round robin traffic between the 3 servers.
The bit where I'm confused is that My Site Settings page asks for a specific My Site Host hence all my site traffic will be pushed to a single server even though we have 3 in the farm. If this hosts fails I presume MySites will be unavailable.
Is this right? How do I configure it so that access to MySites is load balanced across the 3 servers in the farm?
Best Answer
Yes, you need to implement a load balancer (Windows NLB would work for this, but so would a hardware based appliance) in front of your sites. In this scenario you would have 2 load balanced "clusters" setup. The first would be for your content and the second for your mysites. It would look something like this:
So your users only ever go to http://content.yourhost.com and http://mysites.yourhost.com - NLB takes care of the routing to the 3 hosts. It also handles an outage of one of the hosts by not routing traffic to that host.
Within the My Sites settings, you tell it the host is http://mysites.yourhost.com, and again the load balancing will handle the routing to the individual servers.