I have a http server on centos with apache 2 and I am looking at some ways of creating a secondary http server in case the first one goes down or the connection to the primary site goes down. So the secondary http would be in a different physical location and on a different external ip. Would load balancing the 2 servers be possible in this situation and would that be the best solution for a backup http server? The data that would need to be synchronized would only be a mysql database which is not very big at the moment, can't see it getting bigger then 20 or 30 megs in the near future. I am also running my own dns so I can add both the ip adresses of the servers in. Thanx guys
That's possible, but keep in mind that one load balancer is a single point of failure. You'd need two load balancers in a failover setup (which means they must be in the same subnet) for high-availability.
Two loadbalancers are a must.. Check out setting up ldirectord with heartbeat. I did it in about 10 minutes with two boxes balancing traffic to two Apache boxes (and I use it for SMTP/POP/IMAP) You'll have to look up some info on routing outside your LAN, I know ldirector has different routing options.
