Hi,
I'm a businessperson, not a software engineer, so please bear with me if my questions seem simple.

We are about to migrate from MS SQL Server 2000 to 2005. In our 2000 deployment, we have a primary server, with real-time replication to a backup. If we have a hardware failure, we do a manual failover to the backup server. This has served us well for years, with decent performance and no data loss. The SQL server is accessed by a pair of IIS servers, which use network load balancing to split the load between them.

As part of the forthcoming migration to SQL 2005, we are going to a hardware platform with 2 SQL servers sharing a single storage array. We would like to get the performance benefit of utilizing both of the SQL servers to handle requests simultaneously, and not just have the second server as a backup. Ideally, the two IIS servers would dish requests to both SQL servers, either randomly or in some sort of load-balanced manner.

So here is my question: how can we have both SQL servers active and handling requests simultaneously, achieving both high perfromance and high uptime?

If it is not supported natively in SQL Server 2005, is there a third-party software solution that can achieve this?

Finally, where else should I go to do further research on this subject?

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer.