High availability

[SYEDWASIM1]

What is the use of load balancer and secondary portal in high availability,

1)since instance of the service is going to handled by the server

2)Due to high availability User in primary portal should be the user in secondary.

3)Does performance of portal have any relation with number of users accesing the portal like server.

Experts Kindly guide me

[JonathanQuinn]

The point of the load balancer in Portal HA is to balance the requests between the two portal machines but also monitor the health of the machines.  If one machine goes down, the load balancer should be smart enough, (using the built in health check for Portal), to only send traffic to the health machine.  The secondary portal machines is there for redundancy.  While both machines are active in the configuration, (the load balancer will send traffic to both machines and both machines will serve out content), a database on the primary machine is accessed by both portal machines.  The data is replicated to the standby so in the event that the primary goes down, the standby can assume the role of primary and promote it's own database to be the primary database.  Portal is not CPU bound like Server is, so you're not necessarily creating an HA portal for scalability but rather redundancy/availability.