State Server Failover

[WildHare]

I am looking for documentation on state server failover. There is a
microsoft article which sort of talks about protecting against a failed
state server by using SQL server...but it about as clear as mud.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/cpguide/htm
l/cpconsessionstate.asp

which suggests that you can protect against a web server failing by using a
separate SQL Server machine store session state! Yippee!!! But back to the
question...what if the machine storing session state fails??? (in this case
the SQL Server machine).

I sort of prefer (principally because we have no experience with SQL
server...the app talks to Oracle), to use the stateServer mode with a
designated webserver being also the state server. BUT, when this machine
fails (or is taken off line) we are hosed!

Does anyone have a solution to this? ...even a dynamic approach to changing
the stateServer ID would be useful...then if server A is not available, the
applications can switch over to server B.

Comments? Ideas? Thoughts?

Thanks.

 

[Frank Drebin]

If you need a highly-available setup back to your databases, run 2 servers
running WLBS (windows load balancing) or any other load balancer and run SQL
on a RAIDed cluster.. Basically, you could have a disk failure, whole
database server outage or either of the web servers down - and you'd still
be up and running..