Load balancing question

Question

Just a quick question.

If I wanted to set up load balancing for my Railo / Coldfusion application with the least fail points, which of the following two setups would be most optimal and why? Or, would they be the same?

01) Setup 4 VPS instances each with 1GB Ram

OR

02) Setup 1 Dedicated box with 4GB Ram with 4 Railo / CF instances each allocated 1GB ram

Thanks

Answer 1

If you have 1 dedicated box then you have ONE single point of failure.

Luis

Answer 2

You need to analyze the application(s) you intend to run on this cluster and evaluate if there's a need to easily be able to reallocate resources, CPU and RAM, to a particular server. This type of need arise in situations where you want to direct all traffic from a certain place or type to specific server(s). Examples include search indexers, landing pages of marketing campaigns, and splitting traffic by region using IP address. In each case you might want to make the server receiving this traffic have more resources, and if they're finite, and the expense of others in the cluster.