Newly created site collection only available on one WFE

Question

In our farm setup we have multiple WFE servers, these are server 21 and server 31.

When i create a new web application to run on port 84, and then i create a new site collection, i can access this site collection using both of these urls:

• http://21:84/
• http://31:84/

This is all working fine, however, when i create a new site collection at a different managed path using wildcard inclusion, f.e. the standard sites path, things start to go wrong. To be clear, i create a new site collection named Site1 at the sites managed path at the web appliaction on port 84. I can access this site using

• http://21:84/sites/Site1

but when i try to access the site from http://31:84/sites/Site1 i get an error 404, I am totally stumped on what could possibly cause this weird behaviour. Also i cannot seem to find anyone on the internet that is facing the same issue, so any help is appreciated.

edit The server that will have the working site collection access, depends on which one i set to be the default server when creating the web application, but after that it is normal for SharePoint to make it possible to access this site from the other WFE's right, or am I seeing it all wrong?

Answer 1

For future reference, the error i described in my post is actually normal behaviour. I thought that when i created a web application with a site collection, it would automatically be served via all the WFE servers. This is true, but only on the root site collection, to access the other site collections on all WFE servers, I had to add an Alternate Acces Mapping.

My confusion about this originated from our Development envirionment where this behaviour was normal, i later found out however that the extra AAM had been added in that envirionment.

Thanks for the comment Mika Oryszak