Apache Clustering

NightShade03NightShade03 Member Posts: 1,383 ■■■■■■■□□□
I have a question about apache clusters. I know that you can run a Round Robin on the DNS server to load balance hits but it doesn't preserve sessions and such. I have seen that doing load balancing with heartbeats and clustering is the better way to go. My question is do only two servers with a single load balancer constitue a cluster/web farm?

Comments

  • astorrsastorrs Member Posts: 3,139 ■■■■■■□□□□
    My question is do only two servers with a single load balancer constitue a cluster/web farm?
    Yes 2 servers serving identical content being fed by a load balancer is still a web farm
  • NightShade03NightShade03 Member Posts: 1,383 ■■■■■■■□□□
    And it would make sense to have redundant load balancers though right?
  • Forsaken_GAForsaken_GA Member Posts: 4,024
    And it would make sense to have redundant load balancers though right?

    Well, yeah. If you've got dns resolving to a load balanced IP, and the machine with that IP goes down, then the entire cluster goes dead. So configuring with some sort of failover is a good idea.

    With that being said, we don't bother with it at work. Load balancers are like any other network gear, they'll go for years and years and years without being rebooted or failing. The only thing we have a redundant load balancer for is our mail cluster, our web farms are mostly running off foundry load balancers, or software load balancers (which is basically just a box running debian with ipvs)
  • NightShade03NightShade03 Member Posts: 1,383 ■■■■■■■□□□
    The only thing we have a redundant load balancer for is our mail cluster, our web farms are mostly running off foundry load balancers, or software load balancers (which is basically just a box running debian with ipvs)

    So instead of having the 2 servers load balance and have a heartbeat (in case on dies) you run a single server with ipvs which just does the load balancing for you on a single box?

    IPVS is built into the kernel if I'm not mistaken?
  • astorrsastorrs Member Posts: 3,139 ■■■■■■□□□□
    And it would make sense to have redundant load balancers though right?
    Yes of course ;)
  • jibbajabbajibbajabba Member Posts: 4,317 ■■■■■■■■□□
    Use DRBD in conjunction with heartbeat :)
    My own knowledge base made public: http://open902.com :p
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