I'm deploying 2 host-servers (PowerEdge R200) to host our company DNN website (and to host the server application of our software package).

I'm building the following setup (Visio drawing is amateuristic, I'm not a professional system administrator: the 3 "grouped" guests represent a singel Windows Server 2008 R2 install, which act as a Domain Controller, Webserver and SQL Server):

IP Addresses are incorrect by the way and don't mind the "CLUSTERED" label at the SQL Servers, I'm not clustering since I don't have shared storage.

The setup loadbalances incoming traffic with Keepalived (round-robin) on a Debian guest between Production Guest #1 and Production Guest #2.

The setup has been build and SQL Server 2008 Enterprise  have been installed on all systems.

At this point I'm trying to decide on how to configure the SQL servers.
At first I thought I'd use Peer-to-peer transactional replication between the SQLServer#1 and SQLServer#2, so both servers would be able to run completely independant of eachother, should this be needed.

I did find some posts however stating that SQLReplication isn't recommended for usage with DNN. These are quite old posts though and I understand Peer-to-peer replication has been improved a lot in SQL Server 2008 (in comparison with SQL 2005).

I'm not knowledgeable enough on neither SQL nor DNN to decide wether this combo would be any good.

Advice on this matter would be appreciated, since I doubt if I'm heading in the right direction with this setup.

a typical architecture for DNN would be a web farm, using commonly a file share and either a single shared SQL server (due to caching most of the time sufficient) or a SQL Server cluster. This setup removes the need for (slow) replication, however, you may add redundancy according to your needs.

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Cheers from Germany,
Sebastian Leupold

   

Speed up your DNN Websites with TurboDNN

Thanks for the reply Sebastian. Does the "DotNetNuke Web Farm Support.PDF" document still apply to the current Community Edition DNN versions? After studying the document I noticed two things: 1) There's no inputbox for "Run on Servers" (Step 4 - Editing Scheduled tasks) 2) $root\Providers\CachingProviders\BroadcastPollingCachingProverd\.. doesn't exist in my current DNN installation (Step 5 - Alternative Configuration) Would this be because I haven't configured webfarm=true yet? So setting up DNN in an environment as in OP isn't that challenging after all? About the SQL part, which I originally posted for: SQL Server Cluster isn't an option, since I don't have shared storage. So I'd probably go with a single mirrored SQL Server. However, would transactional P2P replication work? Thanks again for advice!