Change from Oracle WC to Varnish

[H.Päiväniemi]

Hi all,

We are currently using Oracle Web cache on quite a big site. We have 18 cache servers and caching is done by 
reverse-proxy method. There is appr. 50000 http req/s on our cache servers together. System is running Linux.

Because Oracle licenses are quite expensive, we would like to know if Varnish could replace OWC on our site.

I would be _very_ pleased if any of you could gimme comments and thougts about this. My main consern is if 
Varnish is or is not able to work in this kind of situation where we are using:

- multiple ip-based virtual hosts (about 50)
- multiple origin server pools of course
- origin server polling to see if they are ok
- both common and site-specific cache-rules
- different kind of expiration policies
- cookie-based and header-based personalization to cache multiple versions of some sites
- origin server capacity throttling / limiting etc
- caching both GET, Get with query strings and POST
- have to have some kind of method to order caches to expire (clear) specific content immediately when asked

So how is it - can Varnish be used or are we gonna have major problems or limitations?


Thank you,

Harri from Finland