Web Farm in asp.net.

A hosting environment consisting of multiple web servers is said to be a Web Farm. Usually a load balancer is used to tie together the web servers, which routes incoming requests amongst the servers within the web farm.

This is the case where you have only one web server and multiple clients requesting for resources from the same server. But when are is huge amount of incoming traffic for your web sites, one standalone server is not sufficient to process the request. You may need to use multiple servers to host the application and divide the traffic among them. This is called “Web Farm”. So when you are hosting your single web site on multiple web servers over load balancer is called “Web Farm”. The below diagram shows the overall representation of Web Farms.

In general web farm architecture, a single application is hosted on multiple IIS Server and those are connected with the VIP (Virtual IP) with Load Balancer. Load Balancer IPs are exposed to external world to access. So whenever some request will come to server from clients, it will first hit the Load Balancer, then based on the traffic on each server, LB distributes the request to the corresponding web server. These web servers may share the same DB server or maybe they can use a replicated server in the back end.

So, in a single statement, when we host a web application over multiple web servers to distribute the load among them, it is called Web Farm.