I am in the process of finalizing the configuration plan and pre-installation documentation for our RoboHelp Server 9 system. We've got 15 seats of RoboHelp 10 and that many content contributors working on four major product lines. The RoboServers (two) will be installed in Windows Azure using Wndows 7 VMs, SQL Server Express (which I believe we will outgrow), and the rest of the software requirements.
I really want us to configure ONCE for TWO servers such that one is the primary or master server and the other is the secondary or "slave" server. The secondary server will only come online if and when the first server fails or does not respond quickly enough; then I expect the second server to come online automatically and quickly.
Does Adobe support this scenario in the software or am I going to be doing some fancy coding/configuration in Windows or (worse still) in my applications that point to the RoboServers to serve help results?
Ideally, content creators would publish once and the new content would automatically mirror to the second server within minutes. I realize I may have do this as some sort of nightly batch job instead. I'm probably off in dreamland by now 
but I would really like to configure the primary server, tell it about the secondary, redundant server, and then have Adobe automatically duplicate all user-account information and other details to the redundant server without any additional instructions. I suspect this is all pie-in-the-sky and that I'm going to have to hand-manage everything on the two machines separately, though doing so is hardly what I would consider "enterprise class". I'm still an optimist and I'm hoping I can do this handholding without too much pain after the initial configuration push.
Anyone have any experience with such a scenario? The primary software product that we're supporting is considered an enterprise-class VHU (very high uptime) system and I'd really like to have the help system available just as many hours as the product itself.
By the way, I'm sure you've gathered that I'm not a full-time IT person as some of the details are quite hazy to me. I'm a documentation manager and as I proposed this RoboServer as a solution to our publication and user-access-management problems, I'm tasked with developing the implementation planning documents. Our IT folks told me to buy two licenses so they can set up redundant servers without investigating if that was a supported configuration, and now I am trying to figure out how to make it work.
I've reached out to Adobe Technical Support but they escalated my call and I won't get info from them until tomorrow. I learned late last week that we are the first group within RR Donnelley to implement RoboServer and Corporate IT is watching my project closely; if it does well, they will recommend it to other groups publishing using RoboHelp throughout the company. No pressure! 
Many thanks,
Julia Ziobro
Documentation Manager, RR Donnelley & Sons
2
Replies
John,
Why are we both working on this holiday weekend? Thanks for responding so quickly, and so helpfully. I will include this information with my configuration suggestions/UAT documentation.
I look forward to the response of the tier 2 tech support person tomorrow and will follow up here as well. Providing failover through Tomcat had not even occurred to me.
Thanks again 
Julia
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