Load balancing and clustering
Load balancing and clustering Open-Xchange
General
Open-Xchange Server 6 is primary built for the Software-as-a-Service world. Hosting and telecommunication providers around the world use Open-Xchange to offer hosted services to their customers. Open-Xchange Server 6 scales vertical and horizontal which means either use a more powerful server or add more machines to fulfill resource requirements. While upgrading a single server installation inevitable gets to a point where costs rise faster than performance gains, adding some simple machines to the installation provides linear cost increase and a slightly more complex administration. Besides the fiscal impact of using medium sized servers another key argument for clustering is service availability, single nodes can go down for maintenance without influencing the general service availability. A typical scenario for clustering is virtualization where multiple nodes can provide resources on demand.
One of the main principles of Open-Xchange Server 6 is the ability to utilize several medium sized servers. This guide will outline the basic principles of clustering Open-Xchange Server instances and provide load balancing to utilize all nodes of a cluster.