Clustering EQEmu

[Valdain]

It might be a little advanced for most of you guys, but has anyone played around with clustering EQEmu? The modular way the zones work seem to lend themselves perfectly to an openMosix setup.

Just curious,
-Valdain

[Merth]

What exactly is clustering? Is there something special about Linux or is it basically load balancing?

If it's just load balancing, yes, many people load balance their servers. My setup has one server for the database/world and two other servers for zone servers.

If it's something special that Linux does, then I'm just talking outta my .. yeah

[Valdain]

The clustering I'm talking about is load-balancing, but totally dynamic.

Here's a quick example:

You have 4 linux boxes running openMosix. On one box, you fire up 20 zones. openMosix will automatically move those zones to balance the load (5 zones on each server)

Now, lets say you have a mess of people connect with most of them connecting to zones hosted on Server #1. openMosix will balance out the load so that each of your 4 servers handles the load as even as possible (processor load, not network load).

All of this is done at the kernel level without any interaction required by you.

The only gotcha I see is the IP connections. I'm only just learning about openMosix, so I'm not sure about the feasability of clustering an IP based application like EQEmu.

If we could work out a system for keeping the connections active while migrating the Zones process between boxes, that would be amazing.

Just a thought. I'm bored at work today.
-Valdain

[Dominatus]

Yeah I have done it on 16 cycle machines I have lying around at work. It actually works very smooth. Once I can get a good dB I'll prob setup a huge server with most all zones up static :D

[Valdain]

Sweet! I knew someone had to be trying it.

-Valdain