title: Load balanced websites on IIS 7
body: <p>Looking at implementing load balancing for Windows hosted web sites on IIS, but want to know of the issues involved in doing so. Website are ASP.NET - with a mix of custom authentication and ASP.NET Authentication. For example:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Files : store on networked share obvious choice, but I expect it will put a lot of demand on the file server, making the websites slow and possibly resulting in the "network BIOS command limit has been reached" issue, or slowing down other data traffic</li>
  <li>Session state : best to store in a SQL database, to prevent issues when responses come from a different server? How to do this? A web.config setting I presume?</li>
  <li>Server downtime : when a server goes down (crash, hardware failure etc) or is updated, will the web sites still function?</li>
  <li>DNS : As it is load balanced, I assume sites will need two IP addresses? Using Microsoft DNS</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Regarding the files, could they easily be synced between servers? There may be up to 8MB files (occasionally bigger). DFS is an option that may be considered in the future, but are there other technologies (besides robocopy) that can be used?</p>