Advisable MMM Solutions

This articles goes over common MMM solutions that are recommended by Hosting.com. This applies to our Linux Cloud and Dedicated solutions. You can find more information about these solutions at http://www.hosting.com/services/platform-services

To setup an MMM environment you will need atleast three servers. These three servers can be compromised of Cloud or Dedicated machines. Hosting.com recommends to use a Virtual Machine that is not resource-heavy (e.g., it does not have 8 CPUs and 16 GB RAM) to act as the Monitor server in this environment. Currently, Hosting.com supports MMM on Linux environments that have RedHat or CentOS Linux distributions.

At a minimum, you would need a setup like this:

In the above example image, there are three servers used to create the MMM environment.The Application server is just using the MMM environment, and not part of the MMM infrastructure. This particular MMM configuration includes two Master MySQL machines (They can be Cloud or Dedicated), as well as a monitor server.  We recommend that the Monitor server be on a lightweight resource VM because it will just be used for monitoring the two MySQL master servers (in this example), and this monitoring is not very resource intensive.

This setup is more common to boost performance:

The above image involves load balanced application servers that tie into a four server MMM environment. The goal here is to have all application servers write to one MMM server (as that is all that is possible in one MMM environment), and to have a one to one relationship between each application server and the amount of MySQL servers they can read from.

Sometimes, adding a 2nd Read Only server may help you boost performance as well. This will have all application servers write to Master1, andt the Application servers can read from Read Only 1, Read Only 2, and Master 2 respectively. No server would need to both read or write unless a failover occurred. This may increase the performance of your application depending on what type of disk utilization it does mostly (read or write).

You can easily expand this configuration to meet your business needs. Keep in mind, the goal is a one to one ratio of Application servers to MySQL Read Only servers (very typical of OLTP websites). For example, if you added two more Application servers, you could add a 2nd Read Only Server as well as a 3rd Master MySQL server to meet the one to one ratio goal.