[ILUG] Load Balancing and clustering

[AJ McKee]

Thanks for the quick reply,

Yeah I have had a look a linux virtual server before and pirana (which I 
hate) I just cannot get my head around it. Linux virtual server seems 
probally the best but I hope I don't run into many problems when I want a sun 
or a freeBSD box added. The bigest problem fo r me is the many os's to cater 
for. 

Antefacto looks cool BTW and yes Ken it is work related so there "may" be 
cash in it for someone ;-)

Cool and Thanks
Aj

On Thursday 25 October 2001  5:34 am, you wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 10:28:47AM -0400, AJ McKee mentioned:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > Hope everyone is well.
> >
> > OK I was wondering what are the alternative to round robin DNS as a
> > method of load balancing a web server. I have done a nice google and the
> > results all seem to be indicating a third party "box".
> >
> > However is there any open source or method of configuring linux to act as
> > a cluster  management server and hece forward all request between various
> > machines with different operating systems but all running web servers?
>
>  There certainly are many ways of doing it. Us at antefacto sell a really
> cute box, based around linux & various open source software tools to do
> load balancing (and a few other things besides). Checkout the website.
>
>  However, if you don't have the budget, and have the time on your hands,
> you can look at www.linuxvirtualserver.org, where you can download the
> "ipvs" patches to linux. This will allow you to setup a linux box as a
> load balancer. However, it should be pointed out that this software can't
> be installed on the webservers themselves - you need a dedicated machine
> to be between the service users, and the servers.
>
>  You need a "monitoring" application to pool webservers ever few seconds,
> to make sure that they are still alive (and worth forwarding requests
> onto). I think www.linuxvirtualserver.org recommends "mon" (we thought it
> was cack, and wrote our own).
>
>  I've had no problem load balancing between a windows machine running IIS
> or apache, and a linux/apache box.
>
> John