Load Balanced Deployments

Question

I have an application that is load balanced across two web servers (soon to be three) and deployments are a real pain. First I have to do the database side, but that breaks the production code that is running - and if I do the code first the database side isn't ready and so on.

What I'm curious about is how everyone here deploys to a load balanced cluster of X servers. Since publishing the code from test to prod takes roughly 10 minutes per server (multiple services and multiple sites) I'm hoping someone has some insight into the best practice.

If this was the wrong site to ask (meta definitely didn't apply - wasn't sure if serverfault did as I'm a dev doing the deployment) I'm willing to re-ask elsewhere.

Answer 1

I use nant scripts and psexec to execute them.

Basically in the farm there's a master server that copies the app and db scripts locally and then executes a deployment script in each server in the farm, that copies the code locally, modifies it if needed takes the app offline deploys the code and takes the app online

Usually the app is of for about 20 seconds (5 nodes)

Also, I haven't tried it but I hear a lot about MSDeploy.

Hope this helps

Answer 2

Yeah, if you want to do this with no downtime you should look into HA (High Availability) techniques. Check out a book by Paul Bertucci - I think it's called SQL Server High Availability or some such.

Otherwise, put up your "maintenance" page, take all your app servers down, do the DB and one app server first, then go live and do the other two offline.