Server Cluster Question

[Tamino]

This may seem like an odd question but my Director insisted I do some research. First let me state the current situation we are in. We have 12 XServes doing authentication and hosting home directories. Some users authenticate on one box and the home directories are on another. Anyway. Apple recommends only 100 connections to each server for home directories. 3 of our servers have hit the 120 average connection per week mark and we are having issues where users get slow log-in times or can't log in at all.

The Director wants to know if there is a way to take 5 or so servers and cluster them together so we can utilize the 100 connections per server and have 500 connections available on one servername.

i.e.
xserve01--
xserve02 |
xserve03 ------Cluster01
xserve04 |
xserve05 --

Each xserve is connected to a fibre channel switch by two fibre connections along with a 7TB XRAID. The XRAID is partitioned as two RAID5 ARRAYS with the following slices:
3TB = Students 2TB = Staff 1TB = Groups

So a students home directory would be afp://Cluster01/Students/<shortname>
A teacher's home directory would be afp://Cluster01/Staff/<shortname>
etc., etc.

What we want to do is be able to have any one of the 5 xserves authenticate and make the connection. Is this possible or might my Director be on some new designer drug?

 

[Go3iverson]

You don't have to necessarily create a cluster to do this. What you can do is simply assign 75-95 OD accounts to a single server for the home directory. That would be a simple way to do this. If you want extreme high availability, you can add in a second server for each primary server and configure the HA scripts for Mac OS X server.

Michael