PS 4.0 PS 4.5 Farms two locations Is DR effective?, in the Performance Tuning / Server Sizing forum on BrianMadden.com

OK here’s the posing question:

In a bid to make DR a more effective I want to pose this question....

I have a site running PS4.0 with some standard users (office type apps) and a DR site again configured with the same stuff but running PS4.5.

The plan is to migrate the old farm to 4.5 status but prior to that I want to try and reduce costs by popping users onto the DR farm. No problem with this yet eh.... they can happily exist in their own little world. My questions are:

• Can I balance the users between the sites as is so users are presented with a single icon and the balancing is still sorted
• If there is latency between the sites of say 200ms will this cause undue problems
• How would I go about it?

Any help would be mucho appreciated here, a diagram for the simple people would be fantastic.

Cheers

Garry

You can go about this a few ways.

First you would create two separate zones for your farm. Zone 1 being home and Zone 2 for DR. Set your rules that Zone 1 should take all of the users first and only send people to Zone 2 if Zone 1 is down. You will need a ZDC at each site for each zone.

Once this is done you will have to publish the same application twice. Let's say you publish Notepad. You configure Notepad for Zone 1 and add the security group that contains only the users that you always want to hit Zone 1 first. You publish that app to both Zone 1 and Zone 2 servers. So the users will see the app and land on Zone 1 first, unless its down, then land on Zone 2. I believe this is done by setting the "do not share load across zones" checkbox.

Configure a second insance of Notepad, this time only publishing it to Zone 2 servers and those few people who you want to hit Zone 2 all the time. Since their app won't be published on any Zone 1 servers, the Zone rules you created earlier won't apply to them. They will land on Zone 2 all the time.

The security in the Web Interface will only allow each group to see their lone instance Notepad. Since you'll probably have rights to see all the apps, you're view won't be pretty with all the double applications icons, but it's not about us now is it?

As far as the latency, its hard to say but at first glance that does look awfully high especially if the ZDC's need to keep tabs on each other.

I think as you say one of the problems here is the latency and that isnt something thats going to go away easily.

Ive had a think about it and I think I might instigate a hardware load ballancer set before the web front ends of each site. this would remove all the complications from it.

Another posing question here though is if there are two farms, they will be pointing to different licencing servers and more importantly different datastores. If I was to try and collate these datastores could they co-exist with one being 4.5 and one being 4 or am I being very messy here.

I think as before the easiest one is to Hardware load ballance

Thanks for the reply much appreciated