HA / Load Balancing / 2 Servers.

[Zion Ahead]

I'm looking for 100% server redundancy between two servers.

Specs:
Cpanel/WHM
Centos 5
Basic Hardware (Celeron / 160GB SATA II Drive)

What is the best method to setup load balancing for redundancy purposes on such boxes? I want the slave server to immediately kick in if the master goes down and at all times, any data changes on the master must be replicated to the slave instantly. Both servers will be in the same facility, probably on the same switch but thats irrelevant I assume.

I found two articles on this, but seems too complex:

http://www.howtoforge.com/high_availability_nfs_drbd_heartbeat

http://www.linux-ha.org/DRBD/NFS


Anyone have a better, more simplified method?

 

[stdout]

Here's a hypothetical I'll throw up in there for you.

1. Run a bash/perl script which constantly pings the active/primary box.
2. If the ping fails, issue a remote reboot to the active/primary box and start ipaliases on the standby box.

Thus you now have a fool proof Failover system for when hardware issues occur, preventing prolonged downtime. You may want to implement a service monitoring tool rather than a basic ping monitoring but this is just a thought up in the air for you to go on.

* Filesystems need to be synced constantly (drbd/netfs/smbd).
* Ofcourse you don't want ipaliases starting by itself on boot up.
You want ipaliases initialized by the perl/bash script.