PUBLIC MARKS with tags heartbeat & architecture

in this article, i outline a step-by-step process for incrementally scaling your deployment, from a simple single-node drupal install running all components of the system, all the way to a load balanced, multi node system with database level optimization and clustering. since you almost certainly don't want to jump straight from your single node system to the mother of all redundant clustered systems in one step, i've broken this down into 5 incremental steps, each one building on the last. each step along the way is a perfectly viable deployment.

MySQL provides a built-in data replication functionality for maintaining identical copies of its data to one or more backend servers, thus providing a simple High Availability mechanism. On the other hand, the Open Source community has several projects to implement failover techniques, being one of them Heartbeat. This article will show you how to implement a clustered, highly available and inexpensive solution based on GNU/Linux and combining MySQL as the database engine and Heartbeat as the failover mechanism. The configuration will consist of a 2-node active/passive cluster.