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My current setup:

1 Http Load Balancer
3 Apache Frontend Server
1 Mysql Load Balancer (Balancing reads across all three, writes go to master only)
3 Mysql Database Server (1 master, 2 slave)

All is good, but I have sudden scheduled bursts of traffic and need to scale up during these peaks. I'm thinking of moving to a simpler routine.

1 Http Load Balancer
n* Apache + Mysql Servers combined (1 of which contains the Mysql master)

Each apache server will read from it's local database but write to the master. This means to scale up all I will need to do is start another server and add it to the LB. Generally I need the same amount of Apache servers as Mysql.

Do you see any problems with this setup? I haven't seen anybody using this setup before so I am wondering what are the disadvantages.

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up vote 1 down vote accepted

By having a single load balancer there's still a single point of failure on your setup. So the first thing I would do, would be to add a second load balancer and setup a virtual ip shared between the two load balancers.

LeasewebLabs has a nice article about how to do that.

Also I believe that webservers should be on different machines than db servers (+ you're probably not going to need as many db servers, as webservers). I understand that your new setup looks easier, but in the end it'll be an overkill imho. Of course it all depends on the type of service/website you're hosting.

Check out serverfault's blog re: their setup for tips: link

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