Last week was a rough week for your team of network administrators. The week started off with complaints of slow website performance. Near the end of the week, the IIS server running your company's online purchasing site went down... hard drive controller failure. It caused massive amounts of data corruption on the server. It took you and your team 48 hours to rebuild and restore the server. According to the CEO, your company lost about $75,000 in sales during the outage.
All fingers are pointing at you. Your boss is giving you one chance to come up with a plan that will help to avoid this situation in the future. She wants to see a plan to build load balancing and redundancy into the IIS environment. You are under a lot of pressure. There is no way you can ask for any new appliances or software. You need to use your existing resources, which luckily includes adequate hardware for a few Windows 2012 R2 servers.
Come up with the plan for your boss. Recommend a solution (NLB, fail-over clusters, etc.) that will avoid future outages. Be sure to explain how and why you need to implement your proposed solution.
BONUS: While she wants you to focus on IIS, you know there's a SQL database in the backend. It is another single point of failure. Would your recommendation for IIS also work with SQL?
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