starting web company, windows web server 1

[bobo12]

good afternoon,
we need to setup a site that can handle large amounts of web traffic, nearly 1500 concurrent users. i wanted to know how approx how much concurrent traffic does windows server web edition support?

i understand that 2003 version has load balancing & clustering implemented, has anyone had success or lack of with these features?

what are some miscrosoft server common issues i need to worry about for setting up a biz of this size? curious to know how db management works in this envoirnment with concurrent trasactions? any resources out there as far as how to make this feasible?

is the best choice for db with iis6.0 mysqlserver? any other recs...

as far as asp enterprise level development on iis is concerned, where can i find some resources.

 

[Castor66]

First rule of a site that's taking large amounts of users - build it redundantly. Duplicate everything - routers, firewalls, load-balancers, web servers, firewalls, database servers etc.

On your questions asked:

Windows Load-balancing is a pile of pants and a pain to work with. For the size of system you are looking at you should go down the hardware load-balancer route.

Windows 2003 server - I don't have figures on how many concurretn users it can support but on our Windows 2000 server farm I am seeing about 10,000 concurrent connections on 6 sites spread over 3 servers. It does depend on your application though. If you have a webserver heavy application then you will need more servers. If a lot of work is being done on an application server or database server then you will need to move the power accordingly.

Database - If you are going down the MS route the SQLServer is the obvious choice. If you are doing a lot of simple transactional stuff you could offload that to MySQL but be aware that it doesn't support stored procedures so a lot of work will be done by your web servers on this route. If you do go down the SQLServer route then be sure to cluster it. Otherwise trying to do anything to it is a nightmare. Again, if you cluster you will need shared storage and that means SAN. Nothing too big - we use HP ML570 servers with MSA1000 disk arrays and they work fine. Our clustering is done with Veritas cluster server as we didn't want to pay the license for Windows Enterprise Edition.

As for the asp - forget it! Go down the .NET route or any other development style. The best resource? A good developer.

Backups - don't forget them. Build a good database replication routine and work the backups through that.

Another thing to remember - security. You probably noticed that I mentioned firewalls twice above. That is because I go for the belt and braces approach to security. I have firewalls on the edge, an intrusion prevention system inside that which also load-balances, the web servers are next, then another firewall, then the database clusters and finally another firewall to keep my internal users at bay. It may be heavy-duty but I get a full nights sleep EVERY night.

Colocation - with a site this big you won't be buying a solution like you would if you were a home user. You will need to rent rack space and bandwidth from a colocoation provider. Choose a large one and ensure that they can provide dual and diverse internet feeds to your infrastructure. One of our colocation providers said they did and it turns out that both feeds were crap!

Monitoring - unless you are going to get your own network operations centre then you will need an external company to monitor your site and servers. Our colocation company does it for us and I find them very reasonable.

Final thing to remember - get good technical people. A couple of good Sys Admins will make your life an awful lot easier. Pay them well and they will repay you in kind. And a good sys admin is a sys admin who doesn't want to change something for the sake of it but only when the benefit is clearly defined.

Last but not least - development. Get a development environment built to be an exact replica of your live environment (without all the redundancy). Also, get a test environment which is the saem as your development and live. A tip is to use VMWare for your test environment. It saves on physical machines when you don't need the power.

Hope this helps.