[Pdns-users] Multi server deployment

[Imre Gergely]

+1 for this configuration and +1 for the excellent writeup :)

On 11/10/2010 05:01 PM, Nick Williams wrote:
> Atha,
> 
> Let me share with you what we did at the company I used to work for (and
> this is an identical configuration to what I have setup for myself). We
> don't have master and slave PDNS servers. We have "workers" of sorts.
> Our master and slaves are the MySQL backends.
> 
> We have a master MySQL server which is the server that we perform all
> writes against. It serves as the master backend, and *no* PDNS
> installations connect to it directly. In fact, PDNS isn't even installed
> on the server that hosts the master backend. Then, on each physical (or
> virtual) DNS server, we have MySQL server and PDNS installed. The MySQL
> server, which is a slave backend, replicates off of the master backend.
> Then, PDNS connects to the local MySQL server for its backend.
> 
> There are many advantages to setting it up this way:
> 
> - Performance: Our PDNS servers are able to more quickly serve out
> answers to questions since they are connecting to a local MySQL instance
> instead of a remote MySQL instance, and we don't have multiple PDNS
> servers querying the same MySQL database, which also decreases response
> time.
> - Robustness: If our master backend goes down, *all* PDNS servers can
> continue to answer questions because they are oblivious to this
> downtime. This is very convenient for maintenance periods, also. If one
> of the "worker" servers goes down, again, this is transparent to the
> master backend and to the other workers, which continue to operate as if
> nothing had happened. We don't use master-master replication and, in
> fact, this increases redundancy, it doesn't decrease it. 
> 
> This is a pretty standard way of configuring PowerDNS, and it has worked
> very well for us. We have had 0% DNS-answer downtime in the last three
> years, even when our master backend crashed due to a hardware failure
> six months ago. It's hard to find any problems with that kind of result.
> 
> This is likely a good fit with your organization's needs, as well. I
> encourage you to look into it. As always, when using MySQL replication,
> make sure you have a DBA who understands (or at least is willing to
> devote serious time to understanding beforehand) MySQL replication
> before implementing this system. MySQL replication is very powerful, but
> it is also a challenging system to set up. If you do it right, it will
> work great for you. If you tune something wrong, you could experience
> some hard-to-diagnose replication issues (which, fortunately, will not
> affect the uptime of your PowerDNS services).
> 
> One more thing, which I believe you will find *very helpful*. The nature
> of MySQL replication is that it can go down temporarily to account for
> minor network fluctuations and recover gracefully. However, problems can
> arise if it's down for long periods of time; say, over 48 hours. What we
> did is set up a very small, PHP-based Cron job that runs on every worker
> server every ten minutes, connects to the local MySQL slave backend, and
> executes the query "SHOW SLAVE STATUS;". It then looks at the columns
> "Slave_IO_Running" and "Slave_SQL_Running" in the result set. If they
> aren't BOTH "Yes", it sends us an alert email, and we know there's an
> issue that needs to be addressed. I highly recommend you do something
> similar.
> 
> Feel free to ask me any questions you may have.
> 
> Nick
> 
> On Nov 10, 2010, at 8:29 AM, Atha Kouroussis wrote:
> 
>> Hi all,
>> we are looking to migrate from bind to PowerDNS with MySQL backend.
>> Our initial tests have gone really well and we are now looking into
>> finalizing the architecture for the final deployment and migration. In
>> that respect we have a couple of doubts.
>>
>> Since we are going to be using the MySQL backend, and we are going to
>> have multiple PowerDNS servers deployed, is it possible to have
>> several instances of pdns share the same backend? How does that affect
>> slave updates in case a master has more than one slave configured and
>> both slaves use the same backend?
>>
>> If its not possible to use the same backend, we are thinking of using
>> MySQL replication, master-slave, and have only one pdns instance
>> listed as slave. What we don't like about this setup is the lack of
>> redundancy since in order to have more than one slave listed we would
>> have to use master-master replication, which we are trying to avoid.
>>
>> What are your thoughts on this? Are there any best
>> practices/recommendations for large deployments? Thanks in advance for
>> all your help.
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Atha
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> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Imre Gergely
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