HowTo: Configure a load-balanced Moodle LAMP cluster

HowTo: Configure a load-balanced Moodle LAMP cluster

by Lawrence Khoo -
Number of replies: 3
Hi Folks,

If you've ever wondered about going beyond a 2 server (moodle + database) cluster for serving Moodle, there's on article up at www.linux.com about how to do exactly this. It's a general article about how to configure a load balancing LAMP cluster, but it's very relevant for anyone who wants to do the same for Moodle.

http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=06/04/12/1824235

Reading through the article, it seems pretty easy to do. Perhaps you can use it to convince your school's IS department that Moodle scales easily, and to switch over from Blackboard to Moodle wink

Lawrence
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Re: HowTo: Configure a load-balanced Moodle LAMP cluster

by Jeffery Watkins -
Great article Lawrence!!!  Thanks for posting it.

Jeff
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Re: HowTo: Configure a load-balanced Moodle LAMP cluster

by Andrew McMillan -
A good article, Lawrence.

One point to note is that this article advocates using DNS round robin for load balancing. Unfortunately this is quite a crude system which will mean that roughly half of your client connections will fail in the event that one web server goes down.

We have found that a much better approach is to use Linux Virtual Servers (or equivalent) which handles any web server failure much better by automatically removing the server from the load balancing pool after a few seconds. It also gives the ability to apply weighting to the backends.

Regards,
Andrew McMillan
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Re: HowTo: Configure a load-balanced Moodle LAMP cluster

by Pieterjan Heyse -
Very true Andrew,

I set up a test case using mod_backhand and wackamole, wich is all distributed. But mod_backhand doesn't exist for Apache 2.0, so I'm looking towards LVS for load balancing. Wackamole does the failover thingy quite perfect.
Have you got any in depth howto's or guides that u used or some more documentation, because I find the documentation on the lvs site quite minimalistic at least.
NZVLE guys, what solution are you using to keep the cluster up, have you got some more specific info on that and is it possible to share this?
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