[Sunhelp] mirroring/clustering/failover

[beemern at telecom.ksu.edu]

> A couple of big questions:
> 
> Is your content static or dynamic?
> If dynamic, is it read-only, read-mostly or read-write to some sort of DB?
> If r/w, how closely do they need to be in sync?
> Do you want user requests to arbitrarily choose a server each time, or
> should a user session be bound to a single server (deja.com is a good
> example of this)?
> Are updates to content regularly pushed out by a back end system, or is
> the live data directly modified?

all these servers will do is web server/servlets and DNS
the 'overall content' is basically static... the pages aren't updated
very often at all.
the servlet engine runs some stuff that talks to our Oracle, which is on
ANOTHER system.

basically, very few modifications are made to the systems, 'cept
occassionaly info updates on the web pages, and editing of the DNS (also
rare)

> 
> Depending on your needs and software you may need anything from a perl
> script or two to an expensive HA package.  The bottom line is that while
> DNS and HTTP are trivial to parallelize, services behind them (such as
> databases) usually are not.

basically, we are wanting to have two machines that are "mirrored",
and we could simply do a DNS round robin so that one client request for
www.foo.bar
will goto server1, the next to server2, the next to server1, etc etc.

so.. basically the machine "mirroring" is the only real task at hand.

thanks for your help!