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Already using php acceleration software and have tweaked both the software and hardware as much as possible. I want a long term solution where I can add additional servers as needed while keeping current hardware in service.
Its time to look into load balancing as a solution for both response time and redundancy but I don' know a thing about them. I'm proficient in Linux but prefer an easy to use plug and play solution.
I initially need to load balance two web servers but want to be able scale higher in the future. Can anyone make a recommendation? I want to spend less than 3k if possible and used equipment if its reliable is allowable but not preferred.
It's free.. Put it on a dedicated server.
Pretty easy to configure as well, no software needed as it comes with a built in web accessible GUI.
Chip-
The Kemp unit isn't as fancy as the more expensive units out there but the feature list is more than enough for me. My biggest problem isn't bandwidth though we do use a lot (about 1 terabyte/month between all our web servers). The site's forums are huge and it CPU load that's been the problem. The database server load is fine (load averages about 0.20 on a dual CPU Opteron with 6 gigs of ram). The Kemp unit will allow me to throw more hardware on the front end and provide fail-over protection. Database fail-over isn't a problem... I have that handled via software monitoring and a slave Msqsl server.
I'll let you folks know how it works out.
is there an inexpensive yet good hardware firewall you could recommend? thanks.
Just a thought.
Also, sometimes hosts offer firewall services depending on the provider. It's typically a monthly cost if you don't want the upfront costs.
Chip-
A low end Sonicwall doesn't meet our needs because it doesn't have enough memory for the number of firewall rules. Our web servers have several hundred rules - blocking all of China, North Korea, and a few other countries.
Our market is almost entirely "western" (trucks and suvs). The USA, Canada, Austraila, parts of South America and western Europe make up 99.99% of our users. Of 350,000+ registered users less than 10 are from the countries we block. Blocking them has reduced bandwidth nearly 10% due to the number of blackhat crawlers, proxies, spammers and scrapers originating from them.
Our large set of firewall rules really helps keep server loads reasonable. Not only that, but the open source Linux alternatives are also more robust and feature rich. They can even auto update their versions if configured to do so.
The Kemp box is Linux based and uses iptables so it is possible to move my firewall rules to it if I need to. With 512 meg of ram it has plenty of power to handle them... and it can be upgraded to 1 gig ram.
The Kemp box arrived today and there is a 30 day money back guarantee so I'll be able to see if it'l do everything I need. I suspect it'll be able to handle all the firewall needs and we won't need to deploy an additional firewall.
I'll keep everyone updated. BTW, this Kemp system boots lightning fast since it uses flash memory for Linux instead of a hard drive!
What's the difference in TCO on that matchup, lol.
Chip-
The Zywall is now doing firewall duties on my home network and the Sonic is sitting on a shelf... if that gives you an idea of how useful they are for our web server needs!
For most sites they are more than enough but not for us.
Had it been as simple to get a total balancer solution from open source I'd have done that as well. But no one open source package handled everything I needed and I don't want to spend a lot time configuring and maintaing a mixed open source solution.
The TZ170 can keep up with basic firewall duties up to 3Mbps(Intrusion prevention, Anti-Virus...) after that it throttles your bandwidth baaaad. Without TPS or Anti-Virus on, it's good for about 40Mbps regardless of what the "box" says.
The 1260 and up can all do much more, but you pay the price. Still cheaper then a Cisco, but...
I run a Radware 2G + 8FE load balancer, picked it up for ~$500ish on ebay last year. Layer 7 switching, gigabit throughput(if you need it) and it's been rock solid since I put it in. I run 3 web servers(2 web servers and 1 image server) all feeding the same domain. I mapped /images to the image server, but to the user it's transparent. Setup is done via a built in web server, which is much better then their old way(you had to have software installed on your PC).
Chip-
The other option is to split out the current "webserver" into web server and application (with the PHP processing happening on the apps and the web server simply deals with the requests). This might be ok for you in the short term but I do accept that you might have to scale horizontally at some point.
