Our eCommerce website www.tervis.com currently runs on two servers:

• SQL server: 2005 x 86 on Windows Server 2003 Standard x86 with a single dual core processor and 4 gb of memeory
• IIS server: Windows Server 2008 Web edition x64 with dual quad core hyper threaded processors and 32 gb of memory

Tervis.com's revenue has steadily grown to the point where we need to have redundant servers deployed with a fail over mechanism so that we do not have any down time.

Because the SQL server is so underpowered compared to the web server my thought was to purchase:

• 2 x SQL Server 2008 R2 web edition x64 single processor license
• 2 x Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Edition Licenses
• 1 x New Physical dual quad core 32 GB server
• 1 x F5 Load Balancer

I need the Windows Server 2008 R2 Web Edition licenses so that I can run SQL and IIS on the same box for both of these servers.

The thought is to run this as an active/passive fail over cluster that could be upgraded to an active/active cluster if we purchased the additional SQL licensing. The F5 load balancer would serve as the device that monitors the two servers and if the current active one stops responding then fails over to using the other server. To be clear this is not windows clustering but simply using a load balancer to fail over between two computers so that you now have a cluster in the general sense.

Is this really the best way to accomplish what I need? Is there some way to leverage the old server 2003 SQL server to function as the devices that funnels http requests to the appropriate active server and then fails over if a problem occurs? Is there any third party clustering software that might help me accomplish this in a simpler fashion?