How to best handle when primary web server is down?

[BobMCT]

Lets assume our single main web server is unavailable for some reason and we want the incoming web access requests to be handled by a secondary static page server issuing a notice of site unavailability.

We originally thought about physically moving the network cable to the secondary box. But that wouldn't work because work needs to be done on the primary server so the same IP's cannot be used.

What are others doing to address this situation? TIA

 

[SamBones]

There is network hardware that you can put in front of the servers to do load balancing. You can either have the traffic going to both equally to share the load, or have one be primary and fail over to the secondary if the primary fails. You can even have more than primary and secondary behind the load balancer. You can have dozens of servers being load balanced if you need to support a huge amount of traffic.

Here's a nice Wikipedia article on it, including some vendors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_(computing)

 

[tarn]

I've used the following (all be it some years ago) within a large Telecom Co for clustering web servers

Worth taking a look

http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

Laurie.

 

[Annihilannic]

I have used LVS too in the past and it was good, although in those days you had to actually patch it in to the kernel code and recompile, which wasn't ideal. Hopefully it's more modular now...

But that wouldn't work because work needs to be done on the primary server so the same IP's cannot be used.

Can you clarify this please? Why not have individual IPs for your servers and an IP address you can switch between them to handle the actual web service... either manually or automatically (as you would need to do for the LVS solution or any other cluster/service management tool).

Annihilannic
[small]tgmlify - code syntax highlighting for your tek-tips posts[/small]

 

[MoreFeo]

¿Active-passive cluster?