Question

I have several reserved instance websites setup on Azure.
I need to load balance 1x domain name across websites several regions.
when I try setup the domain on a website in a 2nd region, I get an error: “Specified Host Name http://www.mydomain.com is already reserved for another site.”
surely it should be possible to provision the same domain on multiple sites? its up to DNS where the request is served.

Answer 1

surely it should be possible to provision the same domain on multiple
sites? its up to DNS where the request is served.

I will strongly disagree with that statement! It is not possible to provision same domain for different sites. It is entirely possible to provision different domains for single site though! In addition, when you are talking about load balancing it is the Load Balancer that decides where the request is served, not the DNS server. The DNS server has a single, one way mapping between a FQDN and IP Address. Nothing more.

If you want to have multi-geo-region distribution / load balancing, you should not use Azure WebSites, but Azure Cloud Services in combination with Azure Traffic Manager. As of today, the Azure Traffic Manager works only with Cloud Services, and not Azure Web Sites.

I would speculate that Traffic Manager will support Azure Websites also in the future, but it is entirely my speculation.

UPDATE

You can achieve your goal by:

1. Create the geo websites in designated geographic regions
2. deploy your content to each of the sites
3. Create a Windows Azure Virtual Machine
4. Install IIS on that VM
5. Install and Configure Microsoft ARR
6. Register your websites with the ARR and configure rules.
7. Point your single domain name to the public single endpoint of the ARR

In ideal world, you will cluster two or more Virtual Machines to serve as ARR and load balance them.

Note that Windows Azure VM is still preview feature.

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