Can someone explain to me how high-availability ("HA") works for a web application ... because I assume HA means that there exist no single-point-of-failure.
However, even if a load balancer is used- isn't that the single point of failure?
I have found this article on the subject:
http://www.tenereillo.com/GSLBPageOfShame.htm
Basically if you do not require long lasting sticky sessions you can configure your DNS servers to return multiple A records (IP addresses) for your website.
Web browsers are smart enough to try all the addresses until they find one that works.
In simple words high availability can be defined as running a system 24*7 without a downtime even if there are hardware and software failures. In other way a fault tolerance application. This helps ensure uninterrupted use of the application for it’s intended users.
Read more on High Availability Deployment Architecture
It works the following way that you setup two HA Proxy servers with heartbeat, so when one fails (stops responding to queries), it's being removed from the cluster.
Requests from HA Proxy can be forwarded to web servers in round robin fashion, and if one web server fails, HA Proxy servers do not try to contact it until it's alive.
Web servers are storing all dynamic information in database, which is replicated across two MySQL instances.
As you can see, HA Proxy and Cluster MySQL (or simply MySQL replication) as well IP Clustering here is the key.
Sure it is when operated alone. Usual highly available setup includes 2 or more load balancers running in cluster in either active/active or active/passive configuration. To further increase the availability you can have 2 different Internet Service Providers (or geo distributed datacenters) each running a pair of clustered load balancers. Then you configure DNS A record resolving to 2 distinct public IP addresses which guarantees round-robin processing splitting DNS requests evenly (CloudFlare is very fast and reliable at this). There's also possibility to return IP address of datacenter closest to your originating geo location by using something like PowerDNS dnsdist
This is what big players do to make their services highly available.
Please read https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-1453/gkkky.html for more clearity. Actually both load balancer uses same vip(Virtual IP Address. https://techterms.com/definition/vip).
HA architecture is a entire field and multiple books were written on it, so it is hard to answer in a short paragraph.
To sum up the ideal situation, you would be using multiple servers, interconnected to a layer of multiple load balancers. The nodes and LB will be located in a few different data centers, and connected to different network backbone. Ideally the data centers will be located all over the world.
In short, all component will have redundancy, including the load balancers.
For a starting point, see Wikipedia for High Availability Cluster
Related
Hi I'm little confused about load balancer concept
I've read some articles about loadbalancer in nginx and from what I've understand is that the load balancer spread the request into multiple servers !
But i thought if one server is down another one is up and running (not simultaneously all server together)
and another thing is when request spread between servers what happen to static data like sessions and InMemory Database like RedisDB
I think i'm confused and missunderstood the loadbalancer mechanism
and from what I've understand is that the load balancer spread the request into multiple servers ! But i thought if one server is down another one is up and running (not simultaneously all server together)
As it comes from the name the goal of load balancer (LB) is to balance the load. As per wiki definition for example:
In computing, load balancing is the process of distributing a set of tasks over a set of resources (computing units), with the aim of making their overall processing more efficient. Load balancing can optimize the response time and avoid unevenly overloading some compute nodes while other compute nodes are left idle.
To perform this task load balancer obviously need to have some monitoring over the resources, including liveness checks (so it can bring out of the rotation the failing servers/nodes). Ideally LB should work with stateless services (i.e. request could be routed to any of the servers supporting handling such request type) but that is not always the case due to multiple reasons, for example in ASP.NET in case of non-distributed session requests should have been routed to servers which handled the previous request from the session, which could have been handled with so called sticky session/cookie.
and another thing is when request spread between servers what happen to static data like sessions and InMemory Database like RedisDB
It is not very clear what is the question here. As I mentioned before ideally you will want to have stateless services which will use some shared datastore (s) to handle the requests, so if request comes for any server/node it can load all the needed data to handle it.
So in short when request comes to LB it selects one of the servers based on some algorithm (round robin, resource based, sharding, response time based, etc.) and send this request to this server so in theory based on the used approach sequential requests from the same source can hit different nodes/servers (so basically this is one of the ways to horizontally scale your application).
I actually found my answer in nginx doc page
Short answer is IP-Hash mechanism
Nginx doc word :
Please note that with round-robin or least-connected load balancing, each subsequent client’s request can be potentially distributed to a different server. There is no guarantee that the same client will be always directed to the same server.
If there is the need to tie a client to a particular application server — in other words, make the client’s session “sticky” or “persistent” in terms of always trying to select a particular server — the ip-hash load balancing mechanism can be used.
With ip-hash, the client’s IP address is used as a hashing key to determine what server in a server group should be selected for the client’s requests. This method ensures that the requests from the same client will always be directed to the same server except when this server is unavailable.
To configure ip-hash load balancing, just add the ip_hash directive to the server (upstream) group configuration:
upstream myapp1 {
ip_hash;
server srv1.example.com;
server srv2.example.com;
server srv3.example.com;
}
http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/load_balancing.html
Currently I have the following setup:
Hardware load balancer directing traffic to two physical servers each with 2 instances of weblogic running.
Works ok. I'd like to be able to shutdown one of the servers without dropping active sessions. Right now if I shutdown one of the physical servers any traffic that was going there gets bounced back to a login screen.
I'm looking for the simplest way of accomplishing this with the smallest performance hit.
Things I've considered so far:
1. See if I can somehow store the session information on the Load Balancer and through some Load Balancer magic have it notice a server is dead and try another one with the same session information (not sure this is possible)
2. Configure weblogic clustering. Not sure what the performance hit would be. Im guessing this is what I'll end up with, but still fishing for alternatives.
3. ?
What I currently have is an overly designed DR solution (which was the requirement), but I'd like to move it more in the direction of HA (for the flexibility)
edit Also is it worthwhile to create 2 clusters and replicate the sessions between them (I was thinking one cluster per site, sites are close enough). This would cover the event of one cluster failing.
You could try setting up a JDBC Session Storage pointing (of course) both instances to the same datasource without setting up a cluster, but I think the right approach would be setting up a Weblogic Cluster.
A nice thing about clustering Weblogic Servers is that - (from the link above, emphasis mine):
Sessions can be shared across clustered WebLogic Servers. Note that session persistence is no longer a requirement in a WebLogic Cluster. Instead, you can use in-memory replication of state. For more information, see Using WebLogic Server Clusters.
We've got a write up of this on our blog http://blog.c2b2.co.uk/2012/10/basic-clustering-with-weblogic-12c-and.html which provides step by step instructions on setting up web session failover in a cluster.
Clusters are not heavyweight assuming you don't store huge amounts of data in the cluster as it will be replicated.
LDAP Fault-tolerance configuration (e.g SunOne):
Does anyboby know how to configuration "Fault-tolerance" for LDAP, e.g SunOne LDAP.
I search via google without any userful result?
Thanks
Assuming, by "fault tolerance," "high availability (HA)" is being asked, I would say it can be achieved by redundancy. And, it would not be peculiar to SunOne or any directory server software from other vendors.
There are different ways to solve this. It depends on the business requirements and the affordability. One method that comes to mind is to have the LDAP software installed on an HA pair. This requires hardware and OS capabilities for fail-over and it requires two servers (in a world of virtualization, "server" can mean different things [physical box, frame, LPAR, etc.]; so, I'll just leave the interpretation to the reader). When one server fails, the other server takes over and assumes the primary role in the pair. This is the fault-tolerance part. In this approach, the machine/server with the secondary role is passive (i.e., it's not serving clients) until the primary goes down. You will need to implement LDAP data replication between two servers. They can be two LDAP masters in a P2P replication topology.
Another method is to have multiple LDAP servers (i.e., masters, replicas) and cluster them using a network dispatcher (ND) software/appliance/etc., which would distribute the incoming traffic to the individual servers (usually replicas) in the cluster. If you lose one replica in the cluster, ND will not send any traffic to that replica until it comes back. However, other replicas will still be receiving load and therefore serving to the incoming traffic. This is the fault-tolerance part in this method. The degree of the availability you want will also dictate what can be done in a clustered environment. You can have a single LDAP master (to which the organization's applications would make updates) and keep it out of the cluster, but pair with another server for fail-over (so you wouldn't lose availability for updates from the applications - this also gives you the freedom to do maintenance on the master without interrupting your applications [well, they need to be written to be able to write to more than one LDAP master if the primary one is not available]). You would have to have the secondary server to receive replication from the primary in any case. If the budget doesn't let you have more servers/replicas, then you can put the master server along with replicas in the cluster as well to help with the read traffic. Instead of an HA-pair in which one of the servers would be passive, you can have two masters configured in a P2P replication topology and have them both in the cluster to help with the traffic too. There are different ways to approach to this method depending on the level of redundancy wanted or that can be afforded.
I've written a simple server application which will run distributed on several machines.
My question is how does a network load balancer works, in general?
I've heard of round-robin and other algorithms, but what I haven't got answer to is how does the process really goes? In socket terms.
The client connects to one of the load balancer machines, asks for a "free-to-connect-to" server and simply connects to it?
That's the simpliest way I can think of.
.. or, does it use the load balancer as a proxy (that implies that all the NBs must be always connected to the application servers, and data is transferred through them)?
It's more of a general question. How would you do this?
Thank you all!
There are several different ways to load balance an application. Some are physical devices that sit between your router and the servers; some are software based with a bit of code that runs on each of the load balanced devices.
Microsoft has load balancing built into Windows which is all software based. It's pretty good and easy to set up.
However, I'll cover the physical route.
There are several algorithms here, but the main one is Round Robin with an option for "sticky" sessions. Sticky in this case means that the load balancer will try to keep a history of clients and forward requests from the same client to the same machine. This means the load balancer needs to keep a list of clients and where it directed those clients. Depending on cache size, clients may fall off the list and on future requests they may be forwarded to a different server.
Round Robin is a pretty simple idea. For each request that comes in send it to the next server in the list. More complicated algorithms might take into account how many requests go to a particular server and how long are those requests taking; then try to rebalance new requests to favor faster servers. This part is complicated though.
I have a Glassfish v2u2 cluster with two instances and I want to to fail-over between them. Every document that I read on this subject says that I should use a load balancer in front of Glassfish, like Apache httpd. In this scenario failover works, but I again have a single point of failure.
Is Glassfish able to do that fail-over without a load balancer in front?
The we solved this is that we have two IP addresses which both respond to the URL. The DNS provider (DNS Made Easy) will round robin between the two. Setting the timeout low will ensure that if one server fails the other will answer. When one server stops responding, DNS Made Easy will only send the other host as the server to respond to this URL. You will have to trust the DNS provider, but you can buy service with extremely high availability of the DNS lookup
As for high availability, you can have cluster setup which allows for session replication so that the user won't loose more than potentially one request which fails.
Hmm.. JBoss can do failover without a load balancer according to the docs (http://docs.jboss.org/jbossas/jboss4guide/r4/html/cluster.chapt.html) Chapter 16.1.2.1. Client-side interceptor.
As far as I know glassfish the cluster provides in-memory session replication between nodes. If I use Suns Glassfish Enterprise Application Server I can use HADB which promisses 99.999% of availability.
No, you can't do it at the application level.
Your options are:
Round-robin DNS - expose both your servers to the internet and let the client do the load-balancing - this is quite attractive as it will definitely enable fail-over.
Use a different layer 3 load balancing system - such as "Windows network load balancing" , "Linux Network Load balancing" or the one I wrote called "Fluffy Linux cluster"
Use a separate load-balancer that has a failover hot spare
In any of these cases you still need to ensure that your database and session data etc, are available and in sync between the members of your cluster, which in practice is much harder.