Blog Entry of 2009-Oct- 9 in Network Monitoring Basics
www.paessler.com Runs on New Hardware and Software
Today we have moved our website to new productions systems. We now have a "private cloud" made of two VMware ESX servers which run our five production servers as virtual machines - plus a load balancer and a firewall.
The new setup looks like this:
The private cloud is hosted in a Rackspace data center. For redundancy we are working with two hypervisors and two servers each for the shop system (shop1, shop2, both Windows/PHP based) and the content management system (www1, www2, both Linux/Django based). Plus a SQL database server. The load balancer is used for automatic failover in case one of the web servers crashes.
Working with these five virtualized servers systems has a lot of advantages for us:
- We were able to create and set up the new production servers on our internal ESX servers. After all software and content was prepared we transferred the VMDKs to the Rackspace datacenter and simply booted the servers there.
- If one of the hypervisors fails, all VMs can be moved to the other hypervisor.
- We are running 1:1 copies of the VMs inside our LAN for further development and testing.
- Creating a full backup is as simple as creating a snapshot of the servers
- We are running a 1:1 copy as "hot-standby" on our own VMware servers. If the whole private cloud fails we can migrate the website to our internal servers by simply changing the DNS entries and get our website back online in a short time.
- Plus the usual advantages of virtualization
- because the new CMS is faster and
- because we are now using the Amazon CloudFront CDN (content delivery network) for all website assets (e.g. CSS, images, javascript) which ensure speedy delivery of these files.