Load Balanced Setup help

I work as a system administrator/website programmer for a government agency and we are working on setting up a new web platform. I wanted to post and see what you guys would do with the hardware that I have at my disposal and see what you all though of my current plan.

Here is the equipment I have on hand.

3 x Dell PowerEdge 650 1U servers (P4 2.6ghz, 2gb ram)
1 x Cybertron P4 3.0ghz 2GB ram 3x200gbIDE
1 x Dell PowerConnect 2508 Gigabit switch

Plus once we move the website to the new servers we will have the old servers freed up... They are Dell P3's one has 1gb ram and the other 2gb.

Our current setup has a dedicated webserver, sybase ASE server, 2 mail servers(one is secondary dns), a windows mapguide server, a dns server.

Our current setup is not scalable and our traffic has outgrown our hardware (which has happened consistently every three years or so).


My plan is to create a load balanced webserver pool and a database server pool.

I am unsure whether we should look at a software load balancing solution such as LVS (ultramonkey, pirahna) or a hardware load balancer. Our equipment budget is pretty much shot for this year already so it would be preferable to use equipment we have.

In our DMZ I would like to do this:

1 director server running UltraMonkey balancing the load to 2 of the dell poweredge 650's (for now, with the option of adding more servers into the pool later). Then have a dedicated sybase server behind each webserver (I'm unsure of how to mirror sybase servers). and have the webservers connecting to the database servers through the gigabit switch on their second ethernet cards. and have the fileserver (cybertron) connected to the switch as well so we can do hourly and nightly backups and store them to that to be backed up onto tape nightly.

So when someone hits our domain the load balancer dispatches the request to www1 or www2 on eth0 and then the server connects to it's corresponding database server db1 or db2 on eth1 through the gigabit switch and then returns the result and then the webserver responds directly to the client (not through the director).

Also does anyone know if the main webserver can also be the direct or (ie. have 127.0.0.1 as an address in the pool)??

Look forward to hearing your suggestions/concerns.

Thanks,
TJ

 

 

 

 

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