Posted by setvik on July 21, 2009 at 10:00am
I had a couple of questions regarding Aegir:
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Does Aegir support provisioning/management of sites where there is a database server and 2+ web servers serving the site?
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Does Aegir support provisioning/managing Drupal multisites using the /path/to/root/sites/[site domain] scheme?
Comments
yes and no...
Out of the box: no. Multi-server support is more oriented towards the concept of shards where each site is on one server and one database, but where you can manage multiple such servers and migrate between them. Once a server is full, you install on a new server. If a site is too heavy for the server, you can migrate it to a dedicated server, etc.
But your requirement should be fairly simple to implement once multi-server support kicks in. If you share the /var/aegir/config directory over NFS (or similar), then all you need to do is to restart apache on both webservers. That could probably be implemented along with multi-server support in 0.4, but it's not part of the roadmap right now. See multiple server support for more information/discussions.
Yes, that's all it does, really. :) A multisite drupal like this is called a "platform" in aegir and you can migrate between platforms quite easily.
Are you using the shards
Are you using the shards setup now?
I like the idea of spiting off sites to their own dedicated server if they start consuming too much on mine.
What are you using to handle the shards, vm's? Sounds very interesting!
No, we're not using shards
No, we're not using shards yet, at least not directly: our first aegir server is not full yet, and 0.4 (that will enable multi-server support) is not out yet. There is a lengthy design discussion underway however...
Thanks
Cool thanks for the link ... some interesting stuff in the works!
Yeah I highly doubt we will peak our current server anytime soon but when the time comes im thinking multi-server support would be great for keeping sites management in one place. It is nice to have things in one place, but I imagine if one of our sites gets too big for its britches we'll have no choice but to bump it off to its own server. That is unless of course we implement some cloud solution to lower the demand, which is always a possibility.
System design
All depends on where the application stops and the "platform" begins, also depending on how you shard the database (or even the app, using something like memcached).
Personally I like the idea of keeping the interface to the database consistent as their may be other application or scaling (or load balancing going on) that needs a consistent approach.