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Using VBox as HA?

Posted: 19. Jul 2011, 09:26
by bennyslax
Hi, I'm new to virtualbox... but I have a thinking but not sure if it work...

I have a forum running and located in our office... which open to the public...

In the night time... server goes crazy as many people come into ...

I have few pc (which is for general purpose)... and they have enough memory and cpu.. .

so can I install something in my host server and "clone" the content of the server and then put them into those pc and make it run?

the content not change often.. only the database is update all the time... (mysql)

if so? how can I impletment this?

I'm using phpbb in a LAMP environment...

thanks everybody...

Re: Using VBox as HA?

Posted: 19. Jul 2011, 09:38
by Technologov
VirtualBox doesn't have any High Availability features, and I have no idea if it can be done by simple scripting.

Enterprise Virtualization products, such as Oracle VDI, that is based on VirtualBox has HA feature, according to rumors.

-Technologov

Re: Using VBox as HA?

Posted: 21. Jul 2011, 06:52
by bennyslax
thanks for your reply...

I'm not saying virtualbox have native HA function...
what i'm mean is.....let say... i want my ha node, which can be running into a virtualbox environment... so any desktop can be my ha node...

can this make my question clear?

anyway thanks

Re: Using VBox as HA?

Posted: 21. Jul 2011, 07:03
by bennyslax
let me give a picture to say more clear

Image

in here... let say I have Real Server 1 and Real Server 2...
so can I 'clone' one Real Server 1 + some modification and then I will have a "Real Server N" , which is a virtual box file format so that I can plug this into a desktop and turn on when i need them?

thanks any help/comments

Re: Using VBox as HA?

Posted: 23. Jul 2011, 14:08
by Sasquatch
If you use a load balancer, it can be done. Since your issue seems to be too many hits on one webserver, having a load balancer is a must-have. That will send each request to the server that has the least load on it. Of course, you database needs to be able to cope with it. It's of little use to have 5 webservers to serve the site/forum to 1000 users when it takes just 100 to bring down the database itself.
How you configure it all, is up to you. Using VB for the load balancing part is fine and should be handled like a physical machine in it's configuration (at least of the OS).

Re: Using VBox as HA?

Posted: 28. Jul 2011, 08:57
by bennyslax
Thanks for the reply...

So... going down to the operational... how can I clone a Linux box to a VirtualBox and make it "looks like" two different machine? (I heard something like UUID (or MAC address)... which need to be unique on each machine...

Thanks for any information....
Best regards

Re: Using VBox as HA?

Posted: 28. Jul 2011, 10:56
by Technologov
VBox 4.1 has such Clone feature. Right click on VM->Clone. It will generate both new UUID and, optionally, new MAC address.

Say hello to Dolly-the-sheep.