[rescue] web server loadbalancing...

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 11:20:45AM -0500, Bill Bradford wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 02, 2001 at 12:13:11PM -0500, Patrick Giagnocavo wrote:
> > My question would be why you feel you need load balancing to begin with.
> 
> Because the Client Said So? 8-)

OK, well, I know you are not a wet-behind-the-ears MSCE.  But what exactly
is the benefit that they want out of it?  Scalability?  Reliability? 

> > There could well be other ways to get what you want, without having to futz
> > around with balancing.

Like, for instance, if they just care about not having a lot of downtime:

have 2 machines, identical in every way, on-site; with no internal drives
+
external RAID array (battery backed cache, etc)

if first machine fails for any reason, unplug the first and hook up the
second.  Boot from external array.  Downtime would be maybe 5 minutes,
probably less.

A thought I just had is that if you had both machines hooked up to the same
SCSI cabling, but had the second machine turned off... then once you turn
off the first box, you can immediately turn on the second.  Stick a port
concentrator on there and you can turn the machines off and on remotely.
Just don't have them both on at the same time.  Of course, if you can deal
with the relative slowness of NFS it gets even easier.

Since everything inside the server box is solid-state aside from the fan
there is little that can go wrong.

disks fail a lot, so the array will take care of that...

Also, check out www.eddieware.org though I have not used it myself.

./patrick