Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Geek Speak => Topic started by: latebind on 22/09/2009 15:22:45
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Hey there
I am new to the concept of virtual ip's.
I understand what I need, I have 2 windows XP machines and I want both to be available
on the same IP address.
I understand I need to setup a virtual ip between the 2 machines, but I really am chasing my own tail because I dont know where to start. (been googling for 2 hours and still not sure)
Perhaps one of the clever minds in TNS can help me??
I should also add, I want to do this because I have 2 identical webservers that I want to 'hide' behind a single IP address. The reason is so that if one of the webservers crashes then there will still be the other left to keep our service running. (The clients will not know the difference because they connect to the virtual IP)
I also understand that I need a load balancer somewhere in the misty equation.
I know what a load balancer is but I dont know the connection between load balancing and virtual IP's, for example does the LB automatically setup a virtual ip or do I need to manually configure a virtual IP for both machines?#
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Are we talking about an intranet, or are the webserver accessable from the internet?
Um... basically you want to set up a cluster with 2 XP machines? Um... that doesn't work... For a real cluster you need the enterprise editions of Windows Server.
You can do it with load balancing, the easiest way would be to set up your DNS server for that. You need 2 entries who point the name of the webserver (i.e. www.abc.com) to the ip addresses of the real machines. You then need to configure the DNS server to do "round robin".
The other option would be a router who can do that for you, either an appliance, but those things aren't cheap, or a linux box, basically a home made router with 2 network cards.
How much load do you expect? If the load is low DNS round robin or a software solution might be the cheapest option, but if the load is higher a hardware option is the way to go.
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Thanks for that
It is on an intranet, we are not expecting high load but we do need a load balancing system so that if one box goes down then at least we have a backup. I think round robin is fine.
So if I understand it, the easiest way is to configure DNS with a single public IP address that points to 2 XP boxes and round robins between them?
I dont have a big budget so I think this is the way I would prefer to try... (also I can only use XP)
Any suggestions?
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but we do need a load balancing system so that if one box goes down then at least we have a backup
Round robin is effectively a "load balancer" by different boxes.
For backup,
What you want is mirror disc RAID hardware strategy through a RAID-Board or at least a disc striping RAID software strategy or on an *extra disc on the Secondary belt.
Look up RAID Levels( here's a good one i just googled into ):
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/different-raid-levels/
* http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/hardware-software-raid-tutorial.html