this is my first post here, and I have searched for a good answer to this question with no luck so far. I am in the process of upgrading our web server (LAMP stack on CentOS 6) to new hardware and more recent software. I'll be migrating our sites to this server when I finish setting it up. I would like to be able to also reinstall the older hardware and essentially make a failover setup of the newer hardware.
My question may or may not be a simple one to answer. I am not an expert by any stretch when it comes to this side of the software stack. Would it be better to install the complete LAMP stack on each server, rsync the sites, and set up database mirroring in MariaDB, or would it be better to only mirror the sites with rsync, and then point the two web servers to a separate database server? I realize the latter would provide a single point of failure, but having never set up database mirroring I want to be sure I'm choosing the right option.
Or are both these options off base, and should I set up a 2 node server cluster?