Upgrading
www6: You can make a difference
By
Francis Chu
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Central web hosting service was set up to provide
a consolidated, fully monitored and managed environment for hosting
departmental web sites and project web sites. Two standard platforms
are provided for web hosting, one for Unix/Solaris (www.cityu.edu.hk)
and the other for Microsoft Windows Server (www6.cityu.edu.hk).
With these web hosting services, website owners can concentrate
on the development of their web contents without worrying about
the server administration, security, patches, backup or operational
support of the web servers. It can also eradicate the level of
risks of having many web servers distributed among departments
and around the campus which, if not properly managed, may be vulnerable
to hacking and attacking activities.
With the increasing popularity of Internet Information Server
(IIS) on Windows Server and the database support of Microsoft
SQL Server, more and more websites have been set up on or migrated
to www6, for example the CityU NewsCentre. The web access rate
had significantly increased to a high volume. To be able to handle
current access and manage future growth, both hardware and software
of www6 have been upgraded successfully on 18 Nov 2008.
In the new system structure, two high-end models of Dell servers
running Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and IIS 6.0 are connected
to a load balancer. All web contents are located in the Network
Attached Storage (NAS) device. Both web servers can access the
same or different web contents on the NAS directly which can then
solve the concurrent read and write problems of the files while
maintaining high availability and load sharing support.
When accessing www6.cityu.edu.hk, the load balancer normally
distributes each access to one of the web servers which is less
busy to serve the request. In case of any hardware or software
failure in one of the servers, the load balancer will be able
to detect the failure and stop distributing access to that web
server. Web service on www6 is thus not interrupted by the failing
web server. Moreover, with this configuration after upgrade, weekly
reboots of the web servers can be performed in turn at alternate
times to provide non-stop services during maintenance and house-keeping
works.
After the upgrade, new features are also introduced in www6. They
are:
In short, upgrading to more powerful hardware and higher versions
of software provides better performance, enhanced security, and
higher availability and reliability for the central web services.
Depending on the growth of demands, the performance of web services
can be further scale out transparently by adding more servers
to the load balancer.