Load Balancing
 

Hello everyone,

I am looking for advice from people working with LVS.

My problem is : I have a webserver farm which is currently being Load-balanced with a commercial software based LB. This is pricey, the box it's running on is out of contract, and on the case i want to setup another failover box I will have to buy another license to do so.
So basically I am trying to find a way out of this, goal is of course to avoid downtime.

Solution one, software based : I build a failover load balancing system from scratch with LVS.
Advantage : Dead cheap.
Drawback : time involved, tuning. Will LVS work as told ???


Solution two, hardware based. Buy a radware/cisco/foundry switch.
Hassle free.

Drawback : Price.

I have the feeling we saw the same trend with RAID based archs a few years ago: First software based raid was popular,then with time we all are now using Hardware Raid controllers.

Unless I have some solid experience inputs from LVS users, my guts say to go towards solution 2.

Thanks fof inputs,

laurent01

This is purely for http traffic? just use apache itself to load balance, either on the servers themself, or as a front tier working as a pair of boxes running an active passive heartbeat to provide HA loadbalacning against whatever back end webserver you want. pretty simple stuff. We're just using some big arse F5 load balancers, but it's just apache running on the inside of it. Don't be distracted by shiny appliances when it's just the same soaftware running on the inside...

Thanks kewpie,
Yes, only http traffic.

You say I can load balance from the webservers themselves ? How do I do that ?

well there are many ways really, for example http://httpd.apache.org/docs/1.3/misc/rewriteguide.html

Thx, I don't want to change the apache conf really because the current LB is in production.

Aside of this ,you're saying it's worth spending time to setup two servers,install them from scratch and start testing the LB and the failover.

Just another question : Is there any web interface available to take some servers out, manage spools and so on with LVS LB ?

i've never heard of LVS before now, i really wouldn't think it was a wrothwhile option personally, but i may be wrong. I would suggest using a front tier of apache boxes (2 for resilience) on a heartbeat to accept the http requests and then forward them on with mod_proxy or such like to internal servers. There are plenty of articles around, and some non-stnadrd modules specifically fro LB like mod_backhand, but i've only seen tha in reference to apache 1.3, not sure it it runs on 2.x.

Thanks for the input kewpie.
I definitely need to take some time and have a serious look around before spending cash on a F5/HP/Cisco/Foundry/Radware box.
As you suggest may be a purely apache based approach would do the job nicely. I do need to be apache2 compliant though, so LVS might be another choice.

A+
Laurent01