IP failover for 3 or more machines ? HeartBeat ?
 

I am urgently looking for a solution for IP failover for 3 or more Linux machines. I am currently using RedHat 7.3. If any of the machines fail, I want the IP to still be accessible as if none of the machines had failed.

The machines in my configuration involve 5 RH 7.3 webservers. I want any of the webservers to be accessible even if one of them fails. This can't be done with Apache/Tomcat, but I have been playing with a piece of software I linked to at www.linux-ha.org named "HeartBeat.

Heartbeat appears to do EXACTLY what I want for a 2 node configuration, but I read somewhere that it will only do 2 nodes. If I could find someone in-the-know about HeartBeat, I could find out if this is true or how to get around it.

Preferably I'd like to set it up so that node 1 fails to node 2.....2 fails to 3....3 fails to 4....4 fails to 5....and 5 fails to 1 .....so that every node has a failover node.

When the failed node is rebooted, I don't want it to cause any problems so there has to be an automatic fail-back process.

As I said, "Heartbeat" works perfect for my 2 node testbed. I'm setting up a 3rd test platform to see what Heartbeat does when I simply add the hostname and IP of the 3rd platform. I expect it to error out. (ne1scott@hotmail.com)