Redundancy, backups, two VPSes: one in NY and one in Seattle

[zean]

Like everyone, I'm absolutely psyched about the prospect of having an NY datacenter, primarily because it now gives an opportunity for me to host two VPSes in two different locations. If set up correctly, I could have true 100% up-time.

I just need to ask then, does anyone have any idea how, with 2 OpenVZ Link-3 Plans, one would be able to host a website, using both plans as redundancy against each other, and backup, and the whole bit? (you know, if one is down, you can still go to the other server, and it's all just fine).

This setup would be totally awesome.

[DanL@VPSLink]

High-availability service configuration is inclusive of many competing solutions - depending upon how you plan to distribute load and optimize your configuration for performance, you have quite a few options.

Round robin DNS is one of the simplest configurations, however, it would not be appropriate to load balancing between geographically distant datacenters unless a layer of program logic at the DNS server implemented GeoDNS (or similar) to ensure that visitors were directed to the closest datacenter unless one of the datacenters were to stop responding.

While it would not be an ideal solution across datacenters, we are working on (and preparing to release) a solution based on HAProxy for high-availability clusters within a single datacenter.

The VPSLink load balancing application will feature:

• Redundant HAProxy servers (no single point of failure for load balancing)
• HTTP and TCP support
• RoundRobin, Least Connection, and Source balancing algorithms (plus cookie-based server persistence for HTTP)
• "Backup" server designation
• (more)

Access to the load balancing application will be free for existing VPSLink customers and the beta testing period may begin as early as next week.