Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 15:18:11 -0800 (PST) From: Thomas McIntyre <temac@yahoo.com> To: car@vitalit.com Cc: freebsd-cluster@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: freebsd cluster target market Message-ID: <20030110231811.98794.qmail@web14207.mail.yahoo.com>
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Rouzer, Charles A (Chuck) said: > Is it fair to say that FreeBSD Clustering may gain adoption more quickly if designed for the hosting market as that seems to be its target market? <snip> I'm not in that market, so I can't really say, but my interests always come back to roughly the same thing. Something like a cluster of web servers running over a clustered database. Everything should be minimized, requires minimal servers, zero specialized hardware, and runs without X windows. The above specs might supply a general model for the business motivations behind clustering. For everything to be attractive, it needs to meet 2 core requirements: 1) Vips w/ load balancing. 2) Robust shared storage. There's a third requirement that often gets a lot of jawboning: 3) Application state replication, preferably in memory. But I think the first two are the key here. The third has an somewhat higher cost/benifit ratio, is insufficiently general, and often can faked by writing state to shared storage. --- So, in context, here's requirements 1 and 2: Two secured RELEASE machines running apache and mysql. The entry point for both applications are vips. The front end is active/active. The back end can be active/passive. I want to later expand vertically (run only a single application per machine) as well as horizontally (add more load balanced boxes). I don't want any special Cisco or F5 hardware or detached switched storage. I don't want to mount anything (particularly databases) over NFS, and I don't want data living on a single node. Of the above, the shared nothing storage is the trickiest. Something like a synchronous write, with a timeout that blows out one node if it takes too long. Robust and configurable semantics like software raid 1 on a single machine. Otherwise, there's three obvious routes: A) Buy a hardware load balancer with sticky sessions and a fibre switch for detached storage. If we really want to waste $$$, we go for a middleware server that hot replicates its internal state. b) On the cheap use something like two active/passive stovepipe systems with application level replication and scripting to keep data in two places. c) Forget the clustering and use tape backups. Nothing gets the grand prize, but it would be great if this project could. --- Apologies in advance if I'm behind the curve, or have only repackaged prior threads. Regards, Tom McIntyre __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-cluster" in the body of the message
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