From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Oct 29 21:26:53 2007 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C806D16A46E for ; Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:26:53 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from p0036343@brookes.ac.uk) Received: from heisenberg.zen.co.uk (heisenberg.zen.co.uk [212.23.3.141]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5695913C494 for ; Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:26:53 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from p0036343@brookes.ac.uk) Received: from [82.70.166.86] (helo=[192.168.0.200]) by heisenberg.zen.co.uk with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1Imc7q-000055-H4 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:26:22 +0000 Message-ID: <47264FD7.2040807@brookes.ac.uk> Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:25:43 +0000 From: Stephen Allen User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.3) Gecko/20070326 Thunderbird/2.0.0.0 Mnenhy/0.7.5.666 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: FreeBSD Questions Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Originating-Heisenberg-IP: [82.70.166.86] Subject: How to provide fail-over capability for servers? X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 21:26:53 -0000 I'm completely new to this so some of my ideas may sound ludicrous... please put me right where necessary! I will have 3 net-facing servers which must be available 24/7. I had planned to have an additional box located in a different building on the same site (in case of part power-outage) that will run VMware server and host all the fail-over servers. What options are there for providing automatic fail-over capability? I had thought of running a cron job every minute that would test for the existence of the other server and assume its identity if it couldn't get a reply, but it feels like a 'sub-optimal' way of doing it. Can anyone give me some ideas I should be looking at? Many thanks, Steve :)