[Wolves] I'm told that you have a loadbalancing guru among you?

[Mark Harrison]

-----Original Message-----
From: wolves-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk
[mailto:wolves-bounces at mailman.lug.org.uk] On Behalf Of chris procter
Sent: 10 April 2007 21:10
To: Wolverhampton Linux User Group
Subject: Re: [Wolves] I'm told that you have a loadbalancing guru among you?

> I dont know any load balancing *gurus* but there are a
> couple of people around here who know a thing or two
> about high availability clustering if that helps.

Gurus is a relative term... on a technical scale ranging from Kermit the
Frog at zero to Linus Torvalds' big brother at ten, I'm about a 3-4. The
scale is, of course, logarithmic :-)

> Ask away and you never know your luck :)

At the moment, I have a server running Apache / PHP5 and MySQL 5- all works
well - the PHP code is able to talk to the local MySQL server.

I'm trying to split this out (for resilience rather than performance) onto
four boxes:

- 2 boxes running MySQL5... this bit I have someone who can do
- 2 boxes running Apache / PHP5, call them WH1 and WH2

The nature of the application is such that there are two classes of users,
so an obvious way to start is to have "group 1" users default to WH1, and
"group 2" users default to WH2. This gives a bit of performance enhancement
(obviously), but does nothing for the resilience aspect.

I've found various HOWTOs that talk about how I could use SIX boxes (2SQL, 2
Apache, 2 load balancer), but I don't have six boxes (nor would I have room
for them even if I could rustle up some extra kit.)

What I'd like to be able to do is have WH1 and WH2 "fail over" onto each
other in a relatively graceful manner.... WITHOUT spending tens of thousands
of quid on Cisco kit :-)

I can't believe that this is an unusual requirement, so I was kind of hoping
someone had a HOWTO that pretty much matched my needs :-)

> chris

Mark