Redundant web server setup

Paramount · 17 Aug 2010 at 09:27

Our company already has a dedicated server in a data centre which hosts a few ecommerce websites, but having had it crash recently my boss has asked me to look into the feasibility of having a redundant server which sits behind the main one, mirroring it. Should the main server crash or require downtime etc the system falls back to the redundant server so there's no website downtime.

Is this actually possible and if so, where should I start looking to learn more?

Sp00n · 17 Aug 2010 at 10:03

Have a look at load balancing, that way if one fails you actually have no downtime whereas if you have a "mirror" then potentially there will be downtime whilst you switch over ports etc..

Paramount · 17 Aug 2010 at 10:05

Thanks for that spoon. I'd literally just come across that term after googling for a bit so am glad to see I was on the right track.

Stelly · 17 Aug 2010 at 10:09

With IIS you can use a round robin principle to balance load between numerous servers.

Stelly

matthab · 17 Aug 2010 at 13:09

Vmware have a lot of good solutions for this. I think they call it vsphere.

sideh · 17 Aug 2010 at 17:37

Have a look at drbd: http://www.drbd.org/home/what-is-ha/

bigredshark · 17 Aug 2010 at 19:09

Load balancing, in hardware (f5 or Brocade). That's how it should be done properly. Massively expensive so speak to a managed provider who offers shared services (I'm guessing you don't have £20k to spend on a pair of load balancers of your own)

kippermitten · 18 Aug 2010 at 17:38

You can use Microsoft NLB but its not the best and can crap out with no good known reason leaving you to evict a host from the cluster and restart it to get back to a two node setup. Plus its throughput is not great in comparison to dedicated load balancers.
A lot of ISP/hosted setups have load balancers you can use for your service, first port of call, speak to your hosting people and see what they say.