Best or optimum Web Server set up with Two servers,development practices

Question

Hi

I am having our company websites (x8 total 500,000per month) on a 1/3 share of a virtual server upgraded to 1 live server and 1 hot backup server. These two will be all our own, and run Debian, A2,M5,P5.2. The live one is more meaty than the spare.

What would be the best way to setup and use these servers?

We do not have a local dev machine in the office so I would like the first one to be live and the second to be failed too if the first goes down or we want to upgrade it.

MySQL will be running as slave on the second.

The way its setup (they are not live yet, sysadmin has given them to me) is that live rsyncs to backup every hour and we should just update live.

But this seems a waste to have no value of backup.

If I run svn on backup. Then a staging/dev copy of the sites exported from svn on backup with rsync up to live when needed. Database would have to be read only on backup as hard to run two versions of db on one server. Then live would also rsync back every hour to backup in a second location (so that there is a as live copy ready to fail to).

Does this make sense?

Answer 1

You should run your primary and backup as such. Do MySQL replication from your primary to your secondary. Do ApacheX.X virtual hosting to separate your (dev, stage, live) and rsync those together. This will allow the best "bang for your buck" in this situation. Do SVN on both as the Primary/secondary should be almost identical in services and hdd setup. I think you'll do fine ;)