Web farm
(1) A group of computer systems and Web server software that collectively provide the Web page delivery mechanism in a company either for internal use (intranet) and/or for the public Internet. It is a server farm made up of Web servers (HTTP servers). See server farm.
(2) A group of Web servers that are controlled locally, but centrally managed. Each Web site is administered by its own Webmaster; however, centralized monitoring provides load balancing and fault tolerance. See server farm.
server farm
A group of servers that are housed in one facility. A server farm comprises dozens, hundreds or even thousands of rack-mounted servers, typically running the same operating system and applications. Using load balancing, the workload is distributed among all machines.
Although the terms "server farm" and "datacenter" are mostly synonymous, a server farm often refers to a "darkened" datacenter full of Web servers that is devoid of people except for machine repairs. A general-purpose datacenter, on the other hand, may have human operators at consoles as well as people loading paper in printers and loading and unloading disc and tape cartridges. See clustering, darkened datacenter and telecom hotel.
另一个与应用程序池有关的特性是，IIS 6.0允许将应用程序池配置成一个Web园（Web Garden）。要理解Web园的概念，可以设想这样一种情形：假设有一个IIS 5.0服务器和三个Web网站，每一个Web网站运行着相同的应用程序，如果IIS 5.0能够自动按照圆形循环的模式将请求依次发送给这些功能上等价、实际上分离的Web网站，将负载分离到三个不同的进程，就可以构成一个小型的Web农场（Web Farm）——这就是Web园。
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