We are a small startup company that is making the switch from Windows to Linux. We sell and are an ASP for medical software. The software we were selling only ran in the Windows world, but now we found a product that only needs a web browser (IE Explorer, Mozilla, etc.) to run. We have a server farm currently with Windows 2k Server and Citrix Metaframe on 7 blade servers. For obvious reasons of cost of ownership and better security, we are switching to Linux.

We currently have SuSe 7.3 available to us, but may get Redhat 8.0 or even Debian...we just want something that will be stable, secure, and can perform load balancing like Citrix does. We know that Redhat Advanced Server has load balancing functionality in it, but have been told that the kernal for Advanced Server is the same as the Redhat 8.0, SuSe personal, etc...it just has more stuff already loaded onto it.

So, finally our question is how can we make a basic install of Redhat, SuSe, or Debian handle this browser based medical software without having to subscribe or buy the Linux server software?
The only application we are concerned about providing is the medical software, so we can get rid of Citrix as well, which currently does our load balancing. Does anyone out there know how to tune the kernal (not sure if that's the right terminology), or software available that works with Linux and can load balance between two servers?

Whew! Thanks for reading the book above and for any responses! The Linux community rocks!

this is high end stuff and i'm only aware of configuring it under RH AS 2.1. but these links would most like produce an alternative:

http://linas.org/linux/load.html

# this is outdated but will give u the overview of what
#you need to do/get:

http://www.redhat.com/support/resources/howto/piranha/

oh yeah, this one is the first hit via google.com/linux "LVS howto":

http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/Joseph.Mack/HOWTO/

born4linux, Thanks for your reply. It's 1:30am here and I'm about to crash, but I will check out your links more tomorrow in the office. I'm obviously very new to the Linux OS and trying to break out of the evil windows world, so any help from anyone is appreciated tremendously. I have very little experience with unix and command prompt (besides compiling my C and C++ programs when I was in school), so much of this stuff is foreign to me...but I am actually excited to learn....damn, what a geek I am! hahaha
Anyway, I will reply back tomorrow and let you know how helpful your links were to us...I know they won't hurt.

Thanks!

no prob. sleep tight dude.