Tech Looking to build a small linux cluster - Need Advice

[RazorSharpe]

Hi,

So I'm looking to put together a small linux cluster using a few hypervisors and software load balancing (possibly HAProxy). I'm not very proficient on system architecture and was wondering if anyone with some experience would mind throwing some scenarios at me.

Things like, do I need to use something like openstack for the VMs? Is there a better option to HAProxy? Is it better to have Varnish in front of or behind HAProxy? Are there things I should look out for? The company that will be hosting this are very responsive and I am sure they have a wealth of knowledge on all of this. I just prefer to be armed with some knowledge myself so I have an understanding of what is out there after researching whatever people suggest to me.

In the interest of giving anyone interested in offering suggestions more information, the cluster will support the following (note that not all of the following will be load balanced).

- wowza media server installation (not load balanced)
- zimbra installation (not load balanced)
- Open X Ad Server ( Not load balanced)
- 6 Nginx frontends
- MySQL (I'm not sure how to run this but I do want redundancy and the ability to separate reads from writes)
- Memcached
- Redis (not load balanced and this is will be used simply to store sessions)
- Varnish

I am looking to deploy the above across 4 hypervisors and for the most part I would prefer to stay open source as much as possible but am open to better alternatives that may be paid solutions too.

If anyone is interested in sharing their know how on here that would be great. If you'd prefer to do it privately, you can skype me: sharpedezine

Thanks for reading!