Looking to start clustering / load balancing services...
i've recently started a new job at a small (4 person) IT company. We do a little of everything - manage networks, installs, hosting, etc. currently our server room is a complete mess and i've been charged with maintaining it, basically i want a do-over. one of our prime concerns is redundancy and availability, currently all of our machines are monolithic in nature - if our web server goes down it'll take a complete rebuild before services come back up.
anyways, i've been looking into...
firstly) procuring rackmount servers and phasing out the tower-on-a-bookshelf approach.
secondly) implementing some sort of clustering / load balancing for redundancy and easy addition / subtraction of boxes when load becomes too high or a machine needs work.
there's a couple of caviates (aren't there always). we're stuck with IIS for now, we have many web-aps that require ASP and in-turn use MSSQL. currently we're running all win2000 boxes which don't natively support clustering. also, our current mail proggy, MDaemon, seems to be a monolithic third party application.
also, do i need to mention that my boss, the owner, is...umm...very careful with money? he doesn't want to buy win2003, is fighting me on getting rackmount machines, says that we will continue to use MDaemon because it's paid for, etc. apparently no one before me knew the joys of linux so now he's locked into MS at least for the near future.
i've been looking at LVS, i'm pretty handy with linux, thinking that i would setup a seperate load balancing box for each service (http, smtp/pop/imap, sql) and use either a seperate monolithic file server for the data or use DFS to sychronize different boxes. personal goals are reliability, availability and (almost as important as the others) ease of use when installing / updating / adding new clients.
so...what insight can webhostingtalk give? anyone have a similar setup? any pitfalls with my plans? should i skip the LVS and demand that he buy win2003 and use the native clustering? or am i just completely batty in takign this on and i should tell him to look for off-site hosting?
thanks for your time.
