[BlueOnyx:23939] Re: Clustering with Easy Migrate

[Michael Stauber]

Hi Felix,

> Can you elaborate a little on how to use Easy Migrate to clone a Vsite
> across multiple servers for load balancing purposes or as a creative
> backup solution when you want poor man's clustering over two servers?

It totally depends on what you're trying to do. It certainly is not a
"one size fits all" solution, nor would I recommend it unless I knew
exactly if it would fit your needs and that you could get it to work on
your own.

If you have a database driven environment with a separate database
server? No email hosted on the Vsite(s) in question? Then you could set
up a cronjob that runs Easy-Migrate to keep selected Vsites synchronized
between multiple servers. I don't even say that this would be a good
idea - just that it would work in theory.

Knowing your setup and needs I wouldn't recommend it. When you have
Email, DNS, MySQL and webpage on the same box you get way too much
friction trying to synchronize all of that to a second box at runtime in
a productive environment.

Over the years I toyed with small scale and affordable "high
availability", but truth to be told: The more mechanism you put up for
that the crankier the whole setup gets. It gets worse if it's a one-off
setup whose intricacies you rarely touch because "usually this just
works" and then you have a downtime, customers yelling at you and (due
to lack of familiarity with the HA-stuff) don't recall the exact
procedure to fit the pieces back together.

At the end of the day I definitely had more outages due to the "high
availability" stuff crapping out than I would have had on a single
regular box without it.

This day and age hardware has become so reliable that we rarely see
server outages due to busted components. Likewise: Virtualization allows
us to have an easily restoreable backup or even a standby-clone of
entire VPS's at the ready, which can - in seconds - be fired up when the
need arises.

-- 
With best regards

Michael Stauber