load balanced routing in beowulf cluster
 

Hi all
I have a Beowulf cluster , running suse 11 , the worker nodes are in a private network and route to the wider network via head nodes with 2 interfaces . I would ideally like to set up load balanced routing using several head nodes , but failing that non load balanced with quick fail over , what do you suggest on how this could be done .

thanks.

One way would be with 2 virtual IPs, round robin DNS, and heartbeat.
You configure heartbeat with 1 virtual ip with the 1st head node as primary and then the 2nd virtual IP on the 2nd head node as primary.
If one of the head nodes goes down then the other head node will take over the virtual IP and answer for both addresses until the down server is restored. Then simply add both virtual IPs to the DNS record so that each time a request for the domain is answered the IPs will be rotated in the answer and about 1/2 the traffic will go to each head node.

If you don't have 2 available IPs you can use heartbeat to set-up an active/backup solution using 1 IP and 1 active head node, with a live backup monitoring the primary/active head node.

Note, you will also have to deal with the private IP your nodes use as the gateway as part of the set-up.

This thread has a little more detail on this set-up:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...8/#post4473241

^C
http://www.peacelovejellybeans.com/

Hi Thanks for the response ! , I wasn't aware of round robin DNS so I will have a look into it , I have also found VRRP virtual routing redundancy protocol which I'll also investigate .
cheers.