MySQL cluster provides high performance distributed and redundant data storage. Cluster data is kept in RAM for high performance, at the same time the data is distributed across cluster nodes in a redundant share-nothing fashion so that the cluster can even survive losing up to half of its node without downtime. At the same time, the cluster storage is transaction safe and provides online backup capabilities.

By using MySQL cluster as a storage backend, it is possible to create load balanced PHP server infrastructures that do not require session affinity to a single web server. Incoming requests can be served by any web server in the server farm as the session information stored in the cluster is visible to all machines at the same time.

This talk will introduce the PHP session storage extension for cluster, its configuration, how to use it, and how to set up a complete redundant clustered LAMP setup.