| Posted by e-Sensibility, 03-28-2009, 06:26 PM | | Does anyone run a setup where 2 or more cPanel servers (perhaps in a shared hosting environment) are dynamically mirrored for high availability?
How have you configured this? Does cPanel play nicely?
Please share your experience.
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| Posted by GOT, 03-28-2009, 07:00 PM | | In this day and age you would be much better off simply using virtualization to acheive this goal. You can use Citrix XenServer 5, use iSCSI on a network to store the server image and have two hardware nodes. High Availability is built into the XenServer system.
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| Posted by bbtn, 03-28-2009, 07:22 PM | | Are you talking about the DNS balancing feature within cPanel?
I've also been thinking of starting to utilize this feature.
I would love to hear more input..pretty sure the OP would like to hear it too.
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| Posted by GOT, 03-28-2009, 07:24 PM | | DNS clustering is a lot different than server mirroring as the OP is looking for. DNS clustering is pretty easy to set up and works pretty well if you have many servers and like to be able to easily move accounts from one server to another.
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| Posted by bbtn, 03-28-2009, 07:34 PM | | Got it.
Sorry that I misread the OP.
So, he is looking for a direct mirror solution then, is there a hardware that can do that, or software?
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| Posted by GOT, 03-28-2009, 07:42 PM | | Like I said, you can do some very nice high availability setups using Citrix XenServer and iSCSI storage. You basically create a XenServer VPS on an iSCSI storage array (typically provided by the datacenter) and the fault tolerance of the iSCSI array virtually eliminates any possibility of data loss. With two hardware nodes, each running Citrix, if the primary hardware node goes down, the standby node can launch the instance of the VPS.
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| Posted by bbtn, 03-28-2009, 07:45 PM | | Interesting.
Thanks for posting, I will have to look into that.
Thanks!
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| Posted by e-Sensibility, 03-28-2009, 08:37 PM | | Thanks for your reply. Although this sounds interesting, I was looking more for something that would fit into my current scheme, and also be compatible with my current staff's technical expertise.
That said, does anyone know of a way to mirror multiple physical cPanel servers?
Thanks a lot for the help so far.
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| Posted by Victor Lugo, 03-28-2009, 08:56 PM | | This is a great question. I'm interested as well.
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| Posted by RZNetworks, 03-28-2009, 09:42 PM | | You could give r1soft backup a try. It basically does a complete server backup to a remote backup server, and in the case of a failure you could restore the backup image to the new server over the network.
Another option is to have a second cpanel server configured, ready to go in the case of a failure, Run cpanel daily backups of the accounts and rsync the directory to the remote server once a day. In the case of a failure on your primary cpanel server, you simply do a cpanel restore of accounts on the secondary server and change the IPs to be that of the primary server, and away you go.
I haven't tried mirroring the entire server as of yet, but im sure with a little research you could find an easy solution for this.
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| Posted by wcguy, 04-11-2009, 04:47 PM | | If I read the original poster correctly, he wants a real time mirror for reasons unsaid.
I am also looking for a real time mirror solution on cpanel in a geographic diverse location for safety purposes. I have a dynamic website, with an ecommerce type mysql database backend that is mission critical.
My primary server is a dedicated server at godaddy.
I own my secondary server hardware co-located in KY.
I want the secondary server slaved to the godaddy server.
I am thinking about trying this protocol written in 2007.
What do you all think?
hxxp://wenderhost.com/2007/06/11/mirror-a-dynamic-website-on-a-cpanelwhm-server/
replace the xx with tt due to posting restrictions. Wouldn't want spam, you know...
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| Posted by larry2148, 04-11-2009, 05:16 PM | | I think the place many of these mirroring/HA setups fall short is support for the databases. Rsync can pretty much keep files in order, but to really go easily HA, you want to do virtualization.
Even with the link above, although it looks like it'd work pretty nice, you'll have to worry about peoples DNS updates, mail and failBACK, not just going to the secondary, but what about going back to the primary.
Does your site you're trying to mirror contain databases or is it simply an HTML site?
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| Posted by larry2148, 04-11-2009, 05:18 PM | | WCGuy, Saw you're using MySql, I'd just advise you to keep in mind what you would do after the server were to fail, IE, how you would get things back in order. What if it fails then comes back up in 10 minutes after a reboot or something, how long would it take customers to be pointed over to the new server etc.
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| Posted by eth00, 04-11-2009, 05:23 PM | | DRBD can be used for real time replication between servers.
Also be aware the HA portions of xencenter are *NOT FREE* and I believe a few thousand per year per server.
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| Posted by wcguy, 04-11-2009, 05:55 PM | | The cost is definitely THE issue. as for the failover problem that larry is referring to, the dnsmadeeasy service seems to have a solution.
I haven't explored larry's very good observation of how to recover. That may be a manual solution.
At the end of the day, I am uncomfortable having my stuff stuck in one place, and don't have enough money for a real solution.
I haven't explored this site much, just found the thread using google,
However, if this article in wired magazine isn't splashed on the front page of this and similar websit forums across the US, it had better be.
Maybe one of you master posters can start a new thread about it.
hxxp://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/04/data-centers-ra.html
again remove and replace xx with tt.
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| Posted by e-Sensibility, 04-11-2009, 07:36 PM | | Xen Motion, the HA portion of the citrix product, although not free, is not needed to migrate VM's from one node to another . . . it is only needed for automatically migrating them between nodes (e.g. if one physical server failed automatically moving all VPS's commissioned on it to another physical node w/o any intervention)
So if you need (near)instantaneous migration, you would have to pay the license, but the free version might still suit your needs if a little bit of downtime while you point and click to "manually" migrate the VMs is tolerable.
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| Posted by CymraegWalesHosting, 04-11-2009, 08:19 PM | | I would be interested in knowing how to do this with an entire server. I would like to have 2 servers in 2 separate datacentres user will go to either or server to share the traffic and also the server them selves will continually sync between each other and if one fails, the other just takes over.
Best,
Nathaniel
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| Posted by eth00, 04-11-2009, 08:35 PM | | DRBD can be used to keep some of the content in sync but not all of the server directories.
If you are using MySQL and you need to do DB writes you would be best off using a MySQL cluster rather then DRBD.
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