how to design pound -> varnish -> jboss for ha + loadbalancing
- by andreash
Hello,
I'm planning a new infrastructure for our web application. We have two JBossAS5 servers, running in a cluster. Session state will be replicated via JBoss Cache.
In front of that, there should be some cache, to speed up delivery of static elements. However, most of the traffic to our app will be via HTTPS.
So far, I had been thinking of two Varnish caches in front of the JBossASs, each being configured for loadbalancing to the two JBossASs via round-robin. Since Varnish doesn't handle HTTPS, then there would need to be two pound proxies in front of the Varnishs, dealing with the HTTPS. The two pounds would be made high-available with Heartbeat/LinuxHA.
The traffic to www.example.com would then be going through our firewall, from there to the virtual IP of the pounds, from there to the Varnishs, and from there to the JBossASs.
Question 1: Does this make sense? Or is it overly complicated, and the same goal can be reached with simpler methods?
Question 2: If my layout is fine, how do I configure the pound - Varnish step? Should I a) make the Varnish service high-available through Heartbeat/LinuxHA as well and direct traffic from pound to the virtual IP of the Varnishs, or should I rather b) Configure two independent Varnishs and use load-balancing in pound to address the different Varnishs?
Thanks a lot for your insight!
Andreas.
