Ron,

Be sure to cover all your bases if you are going to use a HW only solution.

Consider the following...

It has been my experience that most hardware devices do not have any 
insight into the ColdFusion Server. Furthermore, their ability to montior 
"health" is usually focused on CPU and/or memory/disk utiliztion which 
provides only part of the picture to calculate the server load.

As an example... your application makes database queries, and you have the 
timeout set to 30 seconds. Now suppose the queries are taking just slightly 
less time than your timeout setting (say 27 seconds. ColdFusion will now 
set up x threads (depending on what you set in the CF administrator) each 
running a query. CF is now waiting for the queries to complete, and 
queueing up any new requests.

The hardware load balancer will see this box as under no load at all (cpu, 
disk and network utilization will be very low); therefore, it will continue 
to send requests to this box. ColdFusion will continue to queue up new 
requests until the box fails or becomes unresponsive (remember since the 
queries ARE coming back, the restart server feature of the CF admin will 
not "kick in").

ClusterCats on the other hand monitors queued requests, among other things, 
and will see this as a server under load.

Obviously, there are ways other than ClusterCats to deal with an issue like 
this. My point is that when using a HW only load balancer solution, you 
need to be aware of the particular limitations of your HW device.

Rusty

-----Original Message-----
From:   Ron Anderson [SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent:   Thursday, January 04, 2001 9:09 AM
To:     CF-Server
Subject:        RE: ClusterCats and F5 BigIP

No, it was because there was no significant need to run the software if
we're using F5 for load balancing.
I couldn't think of anything we needed ClusterCats for, so we purchased CF
Professional and saved the money for other things...like buying more
servers.



-----Original Message-----
From: Bryan Lee [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2001 8:33 AM
To: CF-Server
Subject: RE: ClusterCats and F5 BigIP


Was it because you ran into the same problem as I described?

-----Original Message-----
From: Ron Anderson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Thursday, January 04, 2001 12:02 AM
To: CF-Server
Subject: RE: ClusterCats and F5 BigIP


We've decided not to use ClusterCats in favor of using the F5 alone.
We monitor our services on a separate server using IPSentry.



-----Original Message-----
From: Bryan Lee [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, January 02, 2001 11:29 AM
To: CF-Server
Subject: RE: ClusterCats and F5 BigIP


Since it was already packaged with enterprise, we wanted to use it to 
notify
us via email when CFServer service failed or if a thread was held open, 
etc.
BIGIP can be configured to alert based on events written to the log, but I
figured ClusterCats could monitor the CF Services and threads better.

Is there anyone out there running CC behind a HLB? or is everyone running
only CC or only HLB?

-----Original Message-----
From: Brook Davies [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Friday, February 02, 2001 1:07 PM
To: CF-Server
Subject: Re: ClusterCats and F5 BigIP


Why do you need clustercats with the F5 BigIP?


At 12:47 PM 02/01/01 -0500, you wrote:
>Does anyone have experience running ClusterCats in passive mode behind the
>BigIP LB?
>
>I've followed the Allaire tech article (15972) for using clustercats in
>conjunction
>with a non Cisco LocalDirector LB...but am getting some poor performance
>results.  When clustercats is turned off, the pages are served up very
>quickly.   However as soon as the clustercats services are turned on, the
>pages are served up very slowly.  Are there any additional settings I am
>missing?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Structure your ColdFusion code with Fusebox. Get the official book at 
http://www.fusionauthority.com/bkinfo.cfm
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with 
'unsubscribe' in the body or visit the list page at www.houseoffusion.com

Reply via email to