In a new post to his blog Kevin Schroeder takes a look at how Zend Server and Zend Server Cluster Manager can fit together to help make maintaining your multiple-machine web server cluster simpler.

PHP is designed using a shared-nothing architecture. [...] That's great! It makes for a very stable, very easy to use architecture. But what happens when you go beyond one server? [...] Managing a hundred servers is quite different from managing one. Heck, managing three servers is different from managing one.

Zend Server gives you all sorts of tools to help manage and monitor the server it runs on, but when you start clustering these servers, the maintenance can be a huge headache. The Cluster Manager comes in and helps with centralized configuration, monitoring, sessions clustering and more. Kevin briefly talks about setting it up (a call to yum install the package) and a few steps through a browser-based GUI interface to get the ball rolling. He's also included a screencast to show each step of the way.