High Availabilty Clustered Hosting with WHM

[waddy]

Hi,

We have 2 x Identical Servers, in two seperate racks, both running Whm/Cpanel, in a "DNS" cluster. We want to Fully Cluster these two servers to provide HA for our "Hosting" we provide for our Customers.

After searching i haven't been able to find much info on how to achieve this, can someone point me to Software or Information please?

Required: Clustered WHM Servers with auto Failover/Load balancing.

[cPanelDavidG]

Hi,

We have 2 x Identical Servers, in two seperate racks, both running Whm/Cpanel, in a "DNS" cluster. We want to Fully Cluster these two servers to provide HA for our "Hosting" we provide for our Customers.

After searching i haven't been able to find much info on how to achieve this, can someone point me to Software or Information please?

Required: Clustered WHM Servers with auto Failover/Load balancing.

This functionality is not natively supported by cPanel/WHM so you proceed at your own risk.

Typically such setups have 2 cPanel/WHM servers and a separate appliance or server to handle directing traffic to the appropriate server.

You would need to mirror the contents of both servers. In a load-balancing environment, centralized storage may be the most practical method of keeping the files up to date on both servers. Many that do implement centralized storage use iSCSI rather than NAS since iSCSI has better handling of disk quotas.

You would also need to have the databases be identical on both servers. You may wish to investigate MySQL Clustering as a means to do this. You may find the following presentation from the 2008 cPanel Conference useful in understanding how you could do this in a cPanel/WHM environment:

http://twiki.cpanel.net/twiki/pub/Al...YSQLServer.pdf

Again, all of this is at your own risk. None of this is supported by us at this time. I'm just providing advice on possible ways to do this.

[waddy]

Very Suprised that there is not a HA enviroment availabilty with this Software due to the actual enviroment it serves, HA is almost as important as actually hosting the site.

DNS cluster is a basic config in Linux and does not provide a HA enviroment as how often does DNS actually Fail?

What do the higher end Hosts use to provide a HA enviroment? VMware, Symatec Cluster?

Anyone running HA and Load Balancing and can help?

[Spiral]

Cpanel does indeed have basic DNS clustering although it could be better but
there are some tricks to get around it's shortfalls. Anyway, I believe
cPanelDavidG was talking about the "mirroring" of the sites themselves not
being directly supported by Cpanel but those too are fairly simple to setup.
You just can't simply go into a single Cpanel menu to do it!

You will need to make a few modifications to the zone files for your domain
on both servers, setup DNS clustering, possibly adjust your settings for
the domain at your registrar, setup a link between your servers if you
are using MySQL or PgSQL, and update the HTTPD.CONF on each server
and restart all the related processes listed above.

It's actually not that difficult to setup but just isn't natively supported
by Cpanel itself yet although that would be a nice idea for a future release.
*HINT* *HINT*

[waddy]

Thanks Spiral.

I am looking for something a bit more on the Cluster Side, load balance.

Set up a Web server cluster in 5 easy steps