What would be the best approach to designing a highly available pool of web services?

Question

I've heard a lot of people touting success using Linux based proxies to handle routing for high availability of web applications, but what are others doing with web services? I have a bank of WCF services that need to be moved to a high availability (failover) model, meaning that if a particular server hosting the WCF services goes down, the request is routed to another of the servers in the bank. I would rather stay away from implementing a Linux based solution, since there are no Linux knowledgeable people in the environment.

Answer 1

I would rather stay away from implementing a Linux based solution, since there are no Linux knowledgeable people in the environment.

This is probably a strong enough reason to not use a Linux-based solution. Doing what you describe well requires reasonable expertise beyond a simple recipe approach, and substantial maintenance.

Answer 2

If you don't need durability, you can load balance WCF service requests just like normal web requests without doing anything special. If you need durability and want requests to survive being cut off mid-process, use the netMsmqBinding.