cPanel Sizing Questions

[downripper]

Hi all,

I am Joseph, a newbie to cPanel. We have a customer that requires load balancing server farm to provide web hosting services. The server farm consists of 48 blade servers in 3 different chassis each. How do I setup cPanel to provide the following features:

a) active-active load balancing across two physically separate sites
b) spanning more than one physical server for large domain
c) sharing one physical server for small domain
d) dynamic provisioning and deprovisioning
e) migrate domain from one physical server to another for maintenance purpose
f) size properly to provide 50,000 email accounts for a large domain



Thanks.

[eth00]

Simple answer - cPanel does not support any of that.

You are going to have to use third party software in order to keep all of that going.

Depending on what types of sites you will be running determines the exact software configuration required. Really though this is not a simple thing at all - have you done any prior research into this or are you just trying to get a feeling for what is out there?

[PlatinumServerM]

This has nothing to do with the control panel. You will need to consult with a company that specializes in that so they can customize it to your exact needs. It sounds pretty complex and quite costly.

[cPanelDavidG]

Hi all,

I am Joseph, a newbie to cPanel. We have a customer that requires load balancing server farm to provide web hosting services. The server farm consists of 48 blade servers in 3 different chassis each. How do I setup cPanel to provide the following features:

a) active-active load balancing across two physically separate sites
b) spanning more than one physical server for large domain
c) sharing one physical server for small domain
d) dynamic provisioning and deprovisioning
e) migrate domain from one physical server to another for maintenance purpose
f) size properly to provide 50,000 email accounts for a large domain



Thanks.

a) You could frequently synchronize the contents of 2 cPanel/WHM servers and have a load balancing appliance handle the load balancing between those servers. None of this is natively supported, but some have implemented such solutions, sometimes using centralized storage and MySQL clustering as a means to reduce the hassle of keeping data synchronized. You would need to implement this yourself as this is not part of our software nor would we provide support for such customizations. However, if you want a list of files that would need to be synchronized, drop an email to sales@cpanel.net with ATTN: DavidG in the subject line.

b) Having a single domain (assuming no subdomains) across multiple servers (other than in a load-balancing setup like mentioned above) is not something that can be readily supported by cPanel/WHM with some straightforward customization as far as I am aware as of writing.

c) Do you mean having shared hosting for smaller domains? I'm not certain what you mean here.

d) One could use the XML API to determine the server with the least load and provision accounts to the server with the least load.

If you're looking for billing functionality for automatic de-provisioning of accounts, I recommend looking at the billing software known to work well with cPanel/WHM listed at:

http://forums.cpanel.net/f7/third-pa...hm-106785.html

e) Assuming you mean for hardware maintenance, this can be done using the migration tools in cPanel/WHM. If you use the express transfer option, you wont incur downtime as a result of DNS propagation. If you use DNS clustering for your entire setup, you wont need to inform your customer to update their nameservers either (depending on how you implement DNS clustering).

f) When it comes to email, your biggest overhead will often be SpamAssassin scanning all the incoming mail for spam. While hosting that many email accounts on a single server is increasingly common, if you find that the spam protection for that many accounts is incurring intolerable CPU expense, you may want to consider alternative means of spam protection such as those listed at:

http://forums.cpanel.net/f7/third-pa...hm-106785.html

The resource utilization is closer related to amount of mail that is incoming than how many mail accounts are present on the server.