This may be a dumb question, and based on the fact that googling has failed me I’m betting the answer is “no”, but I thought I’d ask in case someone else has figured it out.
We’re finally putting our website on a server farm, which means we can’t use InProc session management. We’re using SQLServer mode instead, but we had a situation where our SQL Cluster crashed. During this time, none of our newer web apps were able to load because of an inability to connect to the session database.
So here’s the question: Is it possible to automatically fall back to a different session management (StateServer for example) or dynamically change the connectionstring so that we can use a backup Sql Server?
For now, our plan is to use DNS and if the main SQL Cluster fails, simply switch the DNS to a backup, but that’s a manual task, and takes some time. We were hoping to have some sort of automatic failover.
I am afraid that there is no way. Also switching the session state mode would also make your application crash because users won’t be able to find the data that was stored in their sessions. So an advice I can give you is the following: use a dedicated SQL server for the sessions, don’t use the same server as the one serving your application data. And if you can, progressively start to update your application so that it uses less and less sessions, store very small amounts of data until you completely get rid of it. Make it stateless. Then your application will become very scalable.