[CentOS] "conventional cluster management software"

[Les Mikesell]

nate wrote:
> 
> Clustering is a really complex thing to get right, it can often
> cause more problems than it would otherwise prevent. Even some
> high end clustering is really poor. A couple of jobs ago I had
> to use BEA Weblogic application clustering for a massive J2EE
> app. Ran us roughly $10 or was it $20k per CPU. We had major,
> major outages with that thing. Most of the time we(and BEA)
> were able to trace it to the weblogic cluster itself.
> 
> So think long and hard about what your trying to accomplish,
> and if there is another way to get there without relying on
> clustering. When I say clustering I mean pretty tight integration
> between the systems in the cluster, where if one box can go
> whacky it can take the rest of the cluster with it.

Depends on what you are doing, of course, but you can scale a typical web site 
(lots of viewers of the same content, not too much session-specific data or 
database writes) by replicating the file content across a bunch of servers and 
using memcache in front of your database.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com