cPanel on Cluster or Cloud?

[SingleOS]

Hi guys,

This is my first post there so say "Welcome" My company has used its proprietary control panel for years. However within the next couple of years cPanel has become an industry standard in web hosting and we decided to start offering shared hosting on cPanel servers. That's fine and honestly I think that it will save a lot of time and financial resources on in-house software development.

This was just an introduction. My question is a little bit different. We are now in process of deploying a Linux based Cloud Hosting infrastructure. The platform utilizes RHEL standards and runs on a number of servers connected to external storage. Does cPanel plan to release a Cloud version on cPanel/WHM or is there one available?

I appreciate your response!

Cheers
Alex

[cPanelDavidG]

Hi guys,

This is my first post there so say "Welcome" My company has used its proprietary control panel for years. However within the next couple of years cPanel has become an industry standard in web hosting and we decided to start offering shared hosting on cPanel servers. That's fine and honestly I think that it will save a lot of time and financial resources on in-house software development.

This was just an introduction. My question is a little bit different. We are now in process of deploying a Linux based Cloud Hosting infrastructure. The platform utilizes RHEL standards and runs on a number of servers connected to external storage. Does cPanel plan to release a Cloud version on cPanel/WHM or is there one available?

I appreciate your response!

Cheers
Alex

In attending trade shows, I've noticed "Cloud" is a vague term meaning anything from installing a system in a single VPS node to a geographically dispersed multi-redundant multi-server system.

At this time, we do support remote MySQL servers and DNS clustering. However, in cPanel/WHM version 12, we plan to substantially expand support for more types of remote servers (e.g. remote mail). I have no ETA for version 12 at this time.

Currently, we do not natively support remote/centralized storage. However, many of our customers have successfully implemented such systems into a cPanel/WHM environment using iSCSI. Using NAS tends to cause issues with disk quota enforcement.

Keep in mind that cPanel/WHM is highly customizable, so you will often see providers offering cPanel/WHM with functionality we don't natively offer at this time (e.g. High-Availability Clusters). If you need help customizing our software, always feel welcome to drop us an email to sales@cpanel.net.

[ChrisFirth]

However, many of our customers have successfully implemented such systems into a cPanel/WHM environment using iSCSI. Using NAS tends to cause issues with disk quota enforcement.

To add on to this, in our production environment we use Dell Blades, with /home mounted over iSCSI to our SAN.

We would prefer to use NFS, but in the end we could never get it working.

To get iSCSI working was just a matter on installing the initiator software on the cPanel boxes, editing the config file and then mounting /home. We didn't need to do anything else, it just worked (we have tested this and are currently using the above set up with both a EMC NX4 SAN and MD3000 connected to a pair of redundant heads).

[bangsters]

To add on to this, in our production environment we use Dell Blades, with /home mounted over iSCSI to our SAN.

We would prefer to use NFS, but in the end we could never get it working.

To get iSCSI working was just a matter on installing the initiator software on the cPanel boxes, editing the config file and then mounting /home. We didn't need to do anything else, it just worked (we have tested this and are currently using the above set up with both a EMC NX4 SAN and MD3000 connected to a pair of redundant heads).

We have the same setup, although we run off all partitions in the iscsi not just /home. question tho, how is your backup running? are they storing to the same iscsi arrays or local drives? With our setup, once we run backups everything slows down due to the backup files taking up bandwidth twice, first to go to server to get converted to tar or gzip, then sent back to iscsi array. Workaround could be to put a local hdd just for backup, but we are trying to avoid putting local drives.

any suggestion?

[cPanelDavidG]

We have the same setup, although we run off all partitions in the iscsi not just /home. question tho, how is your backup running? are they storing to the same iscsi arrays or local drives? With our setup, once we run backups everything slows down due to the backup files taking up bandwidth twice, first to go to server to get converted to tar or gzip, then sent back to iscsi array. Workaround could be to put a local hdd just for backup, but we are trying to avoid putting local drives.

any suggestion?

Do you need the backups to be compressed? If not, you may want to consider disabling that in WHM -> Backup -> Configure Backup.

[drewtoma]

Hello,
I'm wanting to do the same thing. Could you set up a load balancing cluster and make all the servers act as one. Then connect a NAS or SAN? Would this at all be possible?
Thanks,
-Drew Toma