this is the personal blog of brandon quintana.

For those of you with high traffic sites or would like to add some redundancy to your MySQL database, clustering is a very good starting point. That is assuming that you have about 4 or 5 machines that you can spare. Howto Forge has a great tutorial on setting this up on 4 machines using MySQL 5 Cluster. The setup requires two storage nodes and one management node and two nodes for load balancing. The example utilizes 4 machines by loading the cluster management server onto one of the load balancing machines.

The document uses Debian Sarge for all nodes. My favorite flavor of Linux at the moment is Ubuntu, which is a variation of Debian. It has become quite popular and I have found it much easier to use than most distributions of Linux. Also they provide free software updates and support.

As stated in the article, this is a practical guide and does not cover any theoretical situations you may encounter.

As the loads on my servers increase, I will probably move into this model. Co-location is another solution to add redundancy to your system. This model of clustering could probably be coupled with co-location to build a solid MySQL database helping to insure your site’s high availability.