Here's a new update:

We tried to run Windows 2008 in our environment, but realized soon that IBM doesn't support Windows 2008 in a BladeCenter environment yet.  The main problem we ran into was finding Win2008 Multipath I/O drivers for our SAN (DS4800).  So, after spending a day on the phone with IBM support and finding that there is no public release date for Multipath drivers for our environment in Win2008, we decided to rollback and just run Windows 2003.  We were really hoping to be able to take advantage of improved performance of clustering in 2008, but without any support, it's just not possible for us to "experiment" on this environment.

So, for any of you are implementing any complex environments using clustering, make sure that all of your hardware vendors will support Windows 2008 before spending too much time preparing the enviroment.

As of this writing, we have successfully prepared our environment as follows (and our next steps are to install an instance of DNN in this enviroment):

• 2 Windows 2003 Enterprise nodes clustered running:
  • 1 node is primary active node for FileShare (where DNN/IIS files will reside)
  • 1 node is primary active node for SQL 2005.
• 2 Windows 2003 Standard Edition nodes (not clustered):
  • Both nodes reside behind a Cisco Load Balancer
  • Both nodes map to our clustered fileshare

Now, we will begin the process of installing DNN in this clustered, load-balanced environment....

Stay tuned??? (for anyone watching this thread)....

-- W.G.

OK, our environment is up and running with full load balanced, web farmed, clustered DNN.
Whew, that only took 3 weeks to complete (after realizing that Win2008 wouldn't be supported in our environment).

We have been testing, and so far, so good.  The only thing that bothers me is the fact that in order to have changes made through one of the web nodes show up on the other, we had to enabled "WebFarm" support in the Web.Config and let DotNetNuke do its sync magic.  There appears to be a performance hit when enabling WebFarmSupport in the Web.Config, but for the redundancy, it might be worth it.

Now off to do some load testing ;)

-- W.G.