Can a State server in ASP.Net be made fault tolerant? By that I mean is when one state server goes down, ASP.Net applications can switch to another state server.
I do not want to go to a Database based state management as that seems considerably slower than the State Server.
You need to configure two different servers in fail over cluster i.e. if one server goes down due to some issue, other server will get up. For details see:-
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc731844%28WS.10%29.aspx
When you configure your servers in fail over mode then a virtual IP is given to you which you will use as your state server’s IP.
Also have a look at peer to peer state server as well:-
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/p2pstateserver.aspx