[olug] Border management / server farms

[Rod Hurley]

Depending upon what you want to accomplish with your website: 

Polyserve will allow you to pool your files as a cluster instead of
pooling your servers as such.  It is a form of file clustering that you
can use to share and virtually cluster all your apps, files, docs, etc. 
It has the brainpower to know when servers fail, apps hang, and
accomodate for such.  You would need a SAN to implement it, since you
need a centralized pooling point for your file cluster.  Polyserve is
tested with later versions of SuSE and Red Hat.

Another plan would be to go with a VMWare product.  In this instance
you would virtually divide your web into 2,3,4 or more O/S 's with the
same apps, or different ones running at the same time on the same box. 
Needs plenty of RAM and I recommend dual (or better) processors, but
much more cost efficient than buying 4 servers (compared to one server
with 4 virtual servers.)  

Citrix Metaframe would be another possibility, pointing to the database
servers and receiving and managing incoming access.  You would still
need a webserver to "host" the citrix authentication if you wish to keep
with the web based theme.

Or you could daisy chain a large group of commodore 64's into a serial
link......just kidding.  

Good luck.
Rod



>>> jay at jays.net 02/04/04 10:09AM >>>

Howdy --

Here's a pie in the sky question for you...

Anyone have any experience high availability web/database farms?

I want to have X web servers and Y databases. I need some magical 
device that can know when server(s) in the farm(s) are offline, happily

continuing to route requests to the other server(s) that are online.

Preferrably I'd use some slice of Linux magic. Alternately, I could 
spend $10K or whatever on some device from Cisco. This is all 
hypothetical at this point, looking at options.

I'm just looking for ballpark info (product names) from anyone w/ any 
experience.

(Yes, I know I could load multiple DNS entries, but I don't want to 
have to wait for DNS timeout(s) if server(s) are offline.)

Thanks,

j

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