Advanced Virtualmin Capabilities Questions

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#1 Mon, 05/15/2006 - 14:58
MartinCusack

Advanced Virtualmin Capabilities Questions

Hello, I have some questions regarding virtualmin and its capabilities out of the box to manage resources and services on a distributed environment. First off let me outline an environment and its needs and maby one of you guys might know some answers off the top of your head. Our environment is Redhat Enterprise Linux 4 running GFS (global fileing system) to provide shared storage using a SAN array (so multiple servers can share host and user data). In addition to the GFS SAN implimentations we have load ballencers coyote point equlizer E250si that are used to manage our services IP and network traffic, basically so we can cluster our web services servers under a single IP or IP pool for use in hosting multiple sites/clients (we choose a static device instead of using LVMs). Along with load ballencing we also utilize multiple networks for public access (2 are public (DMZ) 2 are private 1 is cluster spacific for a total of 5 networks per server, the 2 public access networks operate on multiple IP addresses configurations that we use to round robin in our DNS for each host, this is an active active system for high availability, the 2 private networks are for use in server to server communication to lighten the load off the public access networks [[web server access to a database would use this network]]). So not to be to long winded here thats the basic layout of the system we are running we have our services distributed to multiple servers/clusters for instance our Apache,FTP are located on one group of machines where our databases are on another and our email (postfix) on another and our DNS on yet another. We would like to know if virtualmin by default out of the box can manage this type of environment or if not out of the box by default can it be modified to do so without gross amounts of efforts and time. We need the ability to manage the following in the before mentioned environment

Users and Groups DNS (records would have to reflect Live IP addresses not DMZ addresses) Apache (virtual servers would have to reflect the DMZ IP addresses) MySql (access to these servers is not allowed from the public only server to server communications should take place on the private network implamentation) Postfix (mailbox drops are to take place on a shared storage drive so users can access and send mail from either machine) Storage Quotas (storage is GFS based meaning that the quota commands are a bit differnt compared to standard quota)

Ok so now I have outlined the environment and the needs required to manage it. Let me out line some assumptions I have developed in this regard

I belive a master virtualmin system could be deployed that is basically a all in one type configuration containing all the services we wish to manage therefore the configurations for each service could be used as a staging area for the live services server configurations to be replicated out to the service's server configuration. The only issues i can forsee with this is that we use multiple IP addresses behind a DMZ and some translations would have to be put in place depending on the service

Also we have looked at the clustering options in virtualmin and are not quite clear on the methods used to achieve the clustering functionalities vs. our environment schematic.

Last but not least would it be more fesable to simpaly use virtualmins API to manage machine resources verbatum and develop a system manager to drive that outside of webmin/virtualmin ?

Any information on weather virtualmin can or cannot handle any of the capabilities outlined above would be helpful