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Accepted
Matt
Asked: 2010-06-25 02:59:11 +0800 CST

HAProxy to the rescue? (multiple machines w. vhosts)

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This is more of a 'best practice' or 'input appreciated' question.

Currently we manage about 5 webservers (in two DC's) that run Nginx for PHP websites. The plan is to redesign the setup so it is more manageable from an administrative point of view. One server is in a DC in another network, the rest in a single rack.

We sometimes have to move clients website(s) from one server to another and we would like to allow redundancy for certain clients etc. So a proxy seems a good start and any speed increase is highly welcomed, HAProxy seems like a good candidate for this both.

Our idea at this point is to make a single machine the HAProxy to everything else, so we can redirect anything anywhere, Seems smart to make that machine failover with something like CARP.

Any insights / input are highly appreciated.

virtualhost high-availability redundancy haproxy

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I've setup a system like this in the past; for those who can't afford a full blown second datacenter & highend intelligent switching for failover, its not a bad option.

    There's one significant disadvantage to this, and thats if your paying for your bandwidth wherever the haproxy is hosted, you'll be paying double for bandwidth for connections that are proxied.

    Otherwise its a reasonable solution for those wanting to have loadbalancing or even just active failover.

    Another pretty popular loadbalancer/webserver/proxy is nginx, which might be worth looking at as well.

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  2. you should be able to use internal ip addresses to talk from LB to the backends nodes.. and internal network traffic would cost 0.

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