WCF using certificate over ssl (HTTPS) in load balancer environment

Question

I want to find out how to set up a WCF service, which communicates with client via certificate over SSL (HTTPS) in a load balancer environment. The certificate is used for message exchanges.

Update

Below is current setup:

WCF 3.5 is used, but can be changed to ver 4 if required.

IIS7.5 and ASP.NET 3.5

certificate is installed on each IIS,

each WCF app is installed on each IIS,

certificate is issued to *.mydomainname.com, where my app is under myapp.mydomainname.com

does load balancer require certificate?

Goal

Client uses certificate to communicate with WCF service over HTTPS in load balancer.

Any idea would be very much appreciated!

Answer 1

Your site hosting the service must be exposed on domain name for example:

myapplication.enterprise.com

This configuration must be done on all application servers in the web farm (load balanced servers) = you must assign correct host header. You must request / create certificate for this domain name and install it (including private key) on all servers in the farm. You must configure your web sites on all servers to use this certificate. DNS record for the domain name must be configured to point to IP address of the load balancer.

Load balancing must be done on TCP level to maintain HTTPS between client and your servers. In this scenario load balanced environment should become completely transparent to client and load balancer will not need the certificate because it will only forward TCP connections and SSL tunnel will be created with the real web server.