> I'm thinking about clustering.... I read some of the articles on this > (bpurcells, and others, etc) and I'm still a bit confused about which is > the best way for "Entry Level / simple" clustering. > > Right now I have 1 CFMX6.1 Pro license and a single IIS box, sharing > MSSQL2K with CF over 2 1Ghz processors, and a gig of ram. > > This is what i was thinking would solve the problem for me, in theory. > How do I get this idea off the ground, and how would you do things > differently, assuming there's a shoestring budget for this.?? > > I'd want 2 machines each running IIS and CFMX6.1. Both IIS's would > share both CFMX instances. Assume I have 4-5 cf apps running on virtual > hostnames on the web servers, but only one is massive.... > > Here are my questions. Assuming I have windows 2K servers, how can I > Get uploaded files to propagate across both machines in near real time? > > Do they share a third machine's MSSQL 2k? or do I set up 2 sql servers, > one on each box, with replication? (Can both machines push replication > to each other, or does one always have to be the master?) > > Please advise on a low cost, (hopefully software-based) 2 machine > clustering setup with CF, MSSQL and IIS.
Unfortunately, you don't usually find "clustering" and "low cost" in the same sentence. As others have already mentioned, there are lots of things you can do before moving to a cluster. The biggest single thing you need to do is deploy a dedicated database server on a separate machine. You'd want to do this whether you cluster your web or application servers, or not. To cluster CFMX or run multiple CFMX instances per server, you'd need to purchase one CFMX Enterprise license per machine. Right now, you're running CFMX Professional. So, that would be pretty expensive right there. You could cluster your web server software using the NLB functionality built into Windows. I've set this up before for people using CFMX Professional. In this case, you'd need to avoid using Session variables or use "sticky sessions" to ensure that users only get sent to one cluster member. If you use sticky sessions, you don't get full load-balancing, since if a server goes down the users on that server will lose their session data. While NLB is cheap, being built into Windows Server 2003 (I'm not sure about previous versions), it's not as nice as hardware load-balancers by a long shot in my opinion. As Mike D has said, there's probably room for improvement within your application code and current infrastructure. I would disagree that you should necessarily spend your resources there, though. While I'm all for improving the performance of applications in general, you will have to decide whether it's cheaper to spend time optimizing your applications or to invest in clustering or other hardware solutions. Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software http://www.figleaf.com/ phone: 202-797-5496 fax: 202-797-5444 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Special thanks to the CF Community Suite Silver Sponsor - New Atlanta http://www.newatlanta.com Message: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=i:4:188244 Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/threads.cfm/4 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=s:4 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4 Donations & Support: http://www.houseoffusion.com/tiny.cfm/54
