Load balancing
Load balancing allows FH Web Edition sessions to be distributed across multiple hosts. Load balancing is required when the host resource requirements for a deployment exceed the capacity of a single host computer. Load balancing is done automatically, and is transparent to the user. FH Web Edition can also be used with any third party TCP/IP based load-balancing service.
Load balancing requires the following:
- A FH Web Edition server must be installed on each of the hosts in the cluster.
- For Web deployment, if the load balancer is balancing connections to both the Web server (Example: port 80) and the FH Web Edition server (Example: port 491), each of the FH Web Edition servers in the cluster must have a Web server running, and the Web server home directory should contain the FH Web Edition Web files. If the load balancer is only balancing connections to the FH Web Edition server, the FH Web Edition Web files do not need to be located on each FH Web Edition server. Web files can be installed on the machine running the Web server.
- If an application saves any user-specific settings in the registry, (Example: Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word, etc.) users should operate with roaming profiles rather than local profiles. Since there is no way of predicting which server the user will actually be logged onto in a balanced server farm, working with roaming profiles is the only way to ensure that user-specific settings are available to the user at all times.
A FH Web Edition server can be configured to operate as an independent host, a dependent host, or as a relay server.
Note: A relay server cannot be an application host.
When setting up a load-balanced relay server configuration, you should use a license server. Information on license servers is available in:
- Three-server redundancy.
- License-file list redundancy.
- Configuring FH Web Edition to use a central license server.
Administering relay servers and dependent hosts on different networks