Re: Active/Active servers

[John Madden <jmadden@ivytech.edu>]

> Indeed. I wonder why people even think that "load balancing" with shared 
> storage ever makes sense. The biggest bottleneck in server performance is disk 
> throughput. Putting a bunch of fast CPU frontends in front of the same Bunch 
> Of Disks isn't going to do squat for write rates, and write rates are the only 
> important metric in a replication scenario.

I think perhaps the OP is asking the wrong question, sure, but I see a
great need for the ability to provide a "load balanced" read cluster not
for the performance gains (and there certainly could be some on reads)
but for the HA.  I'd certainly like to be able to quiesce a node for
maintenance, take it out of the cluster, patch it, bring it back up and
have it re-sync, then bring it back into the cluster without any
interruption in service to the users.  It looks like mirror mode in an
active/active cluster (behind a load balancer) would allow me to do
that.

John




-- 
John Madden
Sr. UNIX Systems Engineer
Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana
jmadden@ivytech.edu