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grid environment




Posted by ti_nhatrang, 09-27-2007, 07:22 AM
hi guys, I have 4 of these xeon servers, i want to setup a grid environment... What am I missing? What is my next step? any kind of advice would be appreciated.

Posted by DephNet[Paul], 09-27-2007, 07:52 AM
Have a look at applogic by 3Tera. Paul

Posted by macooper, 09-27-2007, 08:02 AM
I'm no expert on grid servers, but you'd also need some sort of shared storage such as a NAS array. With only 4 server, you'll struggle to do a full scale grid environment. For a full grid array offering the common services, you'd need 2 DNS servers, 1 mail server, 1 IIS webserver for serving ASP and .NET code, i Linux server for running apache and serving php, ruby etc., 1 mysql database server, 1 MS SQL server and at least 1 front end web server. Although it's possible to run more than one of those services on each box, doing so greatly affects the ressilience of the whole grid. Once you have all this setup, you'd need to build a custom control panel to allow your users (assuming it's for webhosting) to login and manage their resources. In addition to the above servers, you'd want a gigabit LAN minimum for traffic between the servers and the SAN,which should be on a seperate private network for security reasons and then a public network with access only to the mail web and DNS services.

Posted by ti_nhatrang, 09-27-2007, 02:54 PM
wow, so it's nothing like a load balancer where you just plug servers in and then you're done? how boy, his this applogic just an app that can go on any server or is it a physical piece of hardware as well? any good how-to step by step documentation on setting up a basic setup?

Posted by ti_nhatrang, 09-27-2007, 09:02 PM
would anyone suggest using grid for production purpose? To me, it seems like it's best for development purpose only... unless you're doing VPS hosting, then that's another story... for example, a site like webhostingtalk... how could it possibility benefit from grid as far as cost and resources? Wouldn't a few high end servers to serve db and www with a lb infront of it make more sense then a grid environment?

Posted by macooper, 09-28-2007, 03:04 AM
I agree, for a medium size site like WHT, using several servers makes more sense. However, a grid environment would help manage a large site such as myspace or google or yahoo. Though I'm not sure how well something like applogic would deal with a grid server environment that covers multiple large data centers.

Posted by ti_nhatrang, 09-28-2007, 11:14 AM
I'm still trying to sell myself the idea that grid can safe the day for high performance website. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but how would one benefit with grid by deploying multiple cpu's? Is grid one big cluster (cpu, memory, etc)... So, lets get this straight, and correct me if I'm wrong. Say I have 8 Quad Cores... I put that under the grid... so does this mean I can deploy a node that will give me 32 cores for 1 system? meaning, 1 Operating system, one website, with 32 cores as my processor?



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