topic Re: recommended load balancer for all services, not just http in Alfresco Archive

recommended load balancer for all services, not just http

xarope — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 08:21:19 GMT

does anybody have any recommendations on how to do LB for a setup proper, including not just alfresco share, but also CIFS and IMAP?I've already implemented, using the recommendations in the wiki for alfresco cluster setup, the simple cluster with two separate alfresco instances+solr, accessing a sh

Re: recommended load balancer for all services, not just http

mrogers — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:11:09 GMT

CIFS is not clusterable on 3.4. It is supported on 4.0 but it requires the CIFS sessions to be "pinned" to a single server, and configuration of the shared hazelcast file state cache.

IMAP is probably O.K.

Re: recommended load balancer for all services, not just http

xarope — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 08:45:01 GMT

Thanks, appreciate the feedback.

For those interested, here's what I came up with for nginx load balancing for web and imap, with php5-fpm for nginx to be able to run the php script for imap auth.

Firstly, the nginx configuration for the alfresco site (I'm using ubuntu, so this sits in the file /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/alfresco). I explicitly only allow access to /share and /alfresco:

upstream alfrescoTomcatInstances {
        ip_hash;
        server 10.0.0.1:8080;
        server 10.0.0.2:8080;
}
server {
        listen 80;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
        proxy_redirect off;
        root /usr/share/nginx/www;
        error_page 404 share;
        error_page 500 502 503 504 50x.html;
        location /50x.html {
                root 50x.html;
        }
        location /share {
                proxy_pass http://alfrescoTomcatInstances/share;
        }
        location /alfresco {
                proxy_pass http://alfrescoTomcatInstances/alfresco;
        }
        location ~\.php$ {
                fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000;
                fastcgi_index index.php;
                include fastcgi_params;
}
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Then enable the imap proxy in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:

mail {
        auth_http localhost:80/mail/auth.php;
        imap_capabilities "IMAP4rev1" "UIDPLUS";
        server {
                listen     10.0.0.3:143; #or whatever ext IP you are listening on
                listen     localhost:143; #for local testing
                protocol   imap;
                proxy      on;
        }
}
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And lastly, the simple auth.php found in /usr/share/nginx/www/, that I referred to in the nginx.conf file, which simplistically just redirects to the first server I have:

<?php
   header("Auth-Status: OK");
   header("Auth-Server: 10.0.0.1");
   header("AUth-Port: 143");
?>
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I intend to make this a bit more load balanced by doing a simple hash against the userid and redirecting to one of the servers, but for now this serves for my testing purposes.

If I can figure out CIFS as well I'll update this post. Thanks again.

Re: recommended load balancer for all services, not just http

xarope — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 03:21:10 GMT

FYI as an update, I ended up using HAProxy for the CIFS and IMAP backend, whilst staying with nginx for the web.

Re: recommended load balancer for all services, not just http

danielf — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:05:27 GMT

If you want enable sticky sessions, you could grab and install the nginx-sticky-module module and replace
<blockcode>ip_hash;</blockcode>
with
<blockcode>sticky;</blockcode>

Cheers!

D.