We, at RustyBrick, are in the process of reworking our server environment. The goal is to get a cluster of servers running, so that we can balance the load of our sites on several servers instead of a site being paired to a single server. Several of our larger clients have this already, but we want to move this configuration over to our smaller clients environment.
Let me start off that I don't fully understand these technologies from within. Ronnie is here for that, so he makes the decision with this. I'll explain from a techno-business stance.
We currently run FreeBSD (FreeBSD.org) on all our machines. But it is out dated and a very old OS. We love that there is no GUI to it, but it doesn't support certain clustering technology that we are wanted to implement. So we have decided to leave FreeBSD and go to a new OS. The question is which one?
There is absolutely no way we would consider Microsoft, so scratch that. We want a flavor of Linux. No, we won't be using Apple Mac - even though we love them. So which Linux flavor?
Gentoo (Gentoo.org) was the most attractive, being one of the newer flavors. Our server management people were most positive about it and it looked great. But there were several problems that forced us to say no to Gentoo. It did not support Urchin, Payflow Pro and some other things that were critical to our business. So that went out the Window (no pun intended Microsoft).
Next up was RedHat (RedHat.com), a very powerful linux operating system that really does everything we want. But what upset us was that it was closed when compared to FreeBSD and Gentoo. There is commercial backing to it, there are support contracts and so on. Our managed services company didn't like that (I suppose because it means we are less dependent on them), but Ronnie didn't like it either because it gives you less control.
This is where Fedora (FedoraProject.org) comes in. Fedora is based on RedHat and backed by them. But Fedora is completely open source and has all the support we need for our applications, I believe.
So at this time, I believe we have selected Fedora to be out next operating system. I'll let you know when it has been implemented. Hopefully, it will be 100% transparent to you.
Comments
We went with CentOS.org's version of Enterprise Linux. One thing that urks me is when you're forced to reload the OS to keep the updates coming, and Fedora is very much that way. CentOS gives you long term support of each release (just like RedHat - spookily similar - ok, the same) without the price of RH Enterprise.
We also have one server primarily responsible for each site, but then use load balancers to make them redundant. The load balancers (redundant) were less than most clustering software I looked at, and it makes config much simpler in my mind. We then use rsync between the servers to keep things the same regardless of server used.
Load balancers looked like the way to go when I was researching redundancy. Let me know if you want any more info on what we're using.
Posted by: Brian Mark | June 19, 2007 10:49 AM
Thanks for the advice, will show Ronnie and server folks.
Posted by: Barry Schwartz | June 19, 2007 10:53 AM
I've heard good things about CentOS and have worked on it a bit. My home machine runs Fedora 7 so I'd be inclined to go with that. RedHat is not a bad solution either, but it sounds like you're going on the Fedora route which works for me. :)
Posted by: Tamar Weinberg | June 19, 2007 11:07 AM