Hi,
This forum does not see much action
I am looking at using Virtualmin in a distributed setup like Apache on node1, MySQL on node2 and so forth.
But I’m not that fermiliur with virtualmin, but I can see it has some sort of Cluster feature, I’m guessing it’s a simple syncronisation of users and setting between nodes?
I’ve tried going trough the documentation of Virtualmin and Webmin. But I can’t seem to figure out how it works.
also tried to goolge and search this forum but the newest entry about this is about 10 years old and does not shed light on what the feature actually is and how it works.
I have installed 4 nodes, but I can’t get the automatic search to find anything in the Server Index, so added them manually, but then they dont show up in the cluster configuration so you can add them?
Can someone explain to me what the Cluster feature does and how it works?
The end goal is to have a single management pain for a system distributed over the nodes so that each node runs one service, when we create new Virtual Servers.
This has been discussed many times over the years. Keep searching, you’ll find it.
In short:
Running MySQL (or MariaDB or Postgresql) on another system is very well-supported in Virtualmin and very easy to setup. It’s made easier to share a single database server with many Virtualmin systems by Cloudmin Pro (using the Cloudmin Connect feature, which is also available in a standalone product for cheaper), but it’s not difficult even without Cloudmin.
Running DNS on other systems is also easy, and in fact you can’t really do it right without having at least one other DNS server. Setting up a secondary DNS server running Webmin is well-documented. If you don’t want to have even a small local DNS server running on the Virtualmin machine but still want Virtualmin to manage DNS, once again Cloudmin Pro or Cloudmin Connect does the thing. The Webmin documentation also covers DNS very extensively, including secondary DNS management and slave zones.
Mail scanning (but not mail hosting) can be run remotely, either managed by, once again, Cloudmin Pro or Cloudmin Connect, or setup manually (with less control, basically you’re just gonna setup a scanning mail forwarder). This takes the CPU/memory load off of the Virtualmin system…given that ClamAV is the biggest thing on many Virtualmin systems (if you’re running AV) and keeps getting bigger at a terrifying rate, this can make a big performance difference.
If you have more than one Virtualmin server, Cloudmin Pro or Connect will be useful for you. But, if you just have one and want to move database and most DNS and mail processing off of the “main” server, that can also be done with no additional tools (except Webmin).
The Cluster features in Webmin are completely unrelated to Virtualmin and there is very little overlap in functionality there. If you have a Virtualmin system, Webmin Cluster features are almost certainly not useful to you (and they’re of questionable use for most folks, I think, as that model of user and data replication is pretty old-fashioned). People still use it for basic synchronization tasks, but you shouldn’t try to munge it into Virtualmin. The Webmin docs cover those modules.
It is a huge topic, and requires cooperation by things we don’t control or develop, to go much beyond this level of distribution. I’m not gonna try to cover it in more depth here…as mentioned, it’s been discussed a lot.
