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I would like to know whether replication or clustering for MySQL is it possible over a WAN environment?

For example

  • Site A and Site B are both at different remote place.
  • Both have MySQL installed.
  • Both are using different internet modems.
  • Both are running Windows.

Can they replicated each other's date?

Are there any guides that I can follow to setup clustering over WAN?

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  • Re-reading this today, I think it's hard to answer properly without knowing more about your motivations. Are you looking for higher availability? A DR site? Scaling out reads? And there are several different technologies that are called clustering--do you mean MySQL Cluster, Windows Failover Cluster, or something else? Commented Jun 16, 2013 at 12:40

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MySQL replication can work over a WAN and is likely your simplest solution. My main concerns (other than running MySQL on Windows for something important enough to need failover) would be making sure the sites have enough bandwidth, and deciding whether to implement compression and/or encryption. I don't have a specific guide to recommend, but they are easy enough to find.

Windows multi-site clustering would be more difficult. You'll need block-level replication of storage and probably high throughput, low latency networking between sites if you want to fail over in a timely manner. Also, the MySQL installer does support Windows clustering now, but I don't know anyone actually running MySQL on a Windows cluster, and I don't know if it was tested on multi-site clusters.

Personally, if I were tasked with improving reliability of MySQL servers running Windows, I'd want to re-evaluate why Windows was chosen as an OS. Windows is perfectly capable of running highly available systems, but historically MySQL has had a number of deficiencies when running on Windows (bugs, resource usage limits, missing features and optimizations), and the MySQL development and support communities are far more active on Linux than Windows. This has improved somewhat since MySQL 5.5 when it was no longer compiled against the Windows POSIX API, but I'm not convinced that MySQL on Windows is at parity with MySQL on Linux. I know this isn't what you asked, but it's hard to honestly answer the question without bringing it up.

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