As I mentioned in a related question about hosting and renting web servers, I am considering creating a cluster of web servers using four Mac Minis (Intel Core Duo) and Windows Server 2008. The website I am developing is managed by a database and uses ASP.Net MVC with Microsoft SQL Server 2008. I am completely inexperienced with setting up a web server, so I only know but not familiar with technologies such as Network Load Balancing and fault tolerance.
Can someone recommend an ideal way to configure these 4 servers together or list my best options? For example, whether only one computer should contain a SQL Server database or create an SQL cluster on top of my Windows Server 2008 cluster. I would like to have a balance between reliability and performance, and I'm not sure what such a balance will look like specifically.
UPDATE: Thanks for all the answers. When I wrote this question, I did not understand that “clustering” generally refers to failover clustering, which, as I understand it, provides high availability, but without performance benefits. Since one poster mentioned that the Mac Mini, with its only 5400 rpm hard drive, might have performance issues as an SQL server, I would like to know if there are any viable solutions for balancing the database load across multiple machines. with or without added a high availability bonus (I can rely solely on backups). I read the following articles about scaling SQL servers through a distribution:
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