Hi Guys,

Just want to ask if it is possible to setup LVS and HA with only two box and both has 1 lan card? I'm planning to setup webserver with load balancing and high availability.

Example:

LinuxBOX1-------------Virtual IP-------------LinuxBOX2

Regards,
gurl4sh25

You "could" but "shouldn't". If you can setup multiple virtual IPs on your NIC you "could" satisfy the requirements for different NICs for LAN access to the cluster and heartbeats and/or other interconnects between the nodes. However, the traffic from the LAN can (and probably will at some point) interfere with the traffic on the heartbeat at which point your cluster is likely to see it as a failure of some sort and start failing over.

If you truly want "high availability" it doesn't really make much sense to go cheap on the network side of things. NICs are relatively cheap and having your heartbeat/interconnects on dedicated NICs helps to to insure they are not impacted by other traffic. (e.g. What happens to your NIC when you kick off a backup over the main LAN?)

Thanks jlightner, you have a good point on that. Actually the second box is running on a virtual machine. This box is running in RedHat Ent 4 installed with vmware server, the virtual machines here are my web, dns and tomcat server. this serve as a backup for my 3 main server (not a VM).

I was wondering what would be the best way to make this automated, let say my main web server was crashed i want my backup virtual machine would take over the connection while my main webserver is down.

Do you have any recommendation or suggestion for this kind of setup that will automate the switching? or HA-Heartbeat would be the best option for this?