Looking for opinions here (anything is fine).

At work we are considering setting up a page where our customers can download Podcasts. These will be simple mp3 files. At this point we are almost certain that we can expect about 300-400 simultaneous connections at certain times in the day for this. As such, we are wanting to use two frontend servers that will use Heartbeat to ensure that at least one of these two servers will be up. Next, the frontend server that is up will direct round-robin style to three different web servers we will have running (in addition to the first two).

Has anyone had any experience doing round-robin with Apache? I've looked at a few docs and this seems simple. My concern is mainly performance. I am wondering if our amount of hardware will be able to handle a 300-400 simultaneous connection load. All five of our servers will have dual processors (2.8 GHz at least) with about 8GB of memory each and use either RHEL 4 or Suse Enterprise 9. Any comments, suggestions or questions would be welcome about this. Also, if for some reason our hardware may seem to be overkill, what would some of you suggest as minimum hardware configs to get this done?

Thanks,

Harlin

I've only read about this. I have heard that if you set up your DNS server to have multiple definitions of the same name with different IPs then it will serve the IPs in round robin style. That means that you don't need your front end server as you describe in your post. This does not take your failover into account. If one of the two servers was down then half of the connect requests would receive 'node not reachable'.

How to overcome this? Again, just a theory. Both web servers have two virtual NICs. Each virtual NIC has the address of the web server addresses. When the heartbeat tells each node that the other is running then only the virutal NIC with the node's address is active. If heartbeat says that the other node is down then the virtual NIC with the address of the other web server is activated.

I've been meaning to try this. If you do then please let me know how it worked out.