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Hi,
I am doing a solution design for a company that wants to move their website locally, away from the hosting provider.

It will be running Joomla the open source CMS, so Apache, MySQL and PHP. I am planning on placing the database data store on a XRaid and then two front-end servers that will run the App
SSL transactions will be offloaded to a SSL/Application Accelerator.

My question is, how can I test the load of this configuration…. or get a benchmark before we buy the hardware.
And are their any objections on the design? (I am sure there are as I am not to sure if this will work!) This will a first for me in regards to setting up the database on XRaid…
The SSL/Application Accelerator will be doing the load balancing for the users coming in from outside… so I just need to worry about the data base.
Then I am investigating the ability to somehow cluster the two App servers and use the single data store.

Thanks in advance for the help.