[olug] Border management / server farms

[Brian Roberson]

There are nine ways from sunday to do this, including the linux virtual
server[1] ( LVS ) project,
but if you only need to network load balance with application level checking
you cannot beat
the price of a used Cisco LocaDirector 410/420. the biggest downfall for LVS
is that the dynamic addition/removal
of servers/services is not trully bundled with the actual load balancing
package, it is an add on from the LinuxHA[2]
project called mon. The old Cisco LocalDirector can do a very good job up to
the app layer[3] for checking servers/services.

Keep in mind that the local director is end of life, the replacement to the
LocalDirector is the CSSxxx line which was aquired by arrowpoint.
In all fairness however, there are other built-in load balancers to almost
every layer3 switch, such as Enterasys,Lucent, Foundry etc..etc..etc...
which just as good, if not better than the old LD[4].



[1] http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org
[2] http://www.linux-ha.org/
[3] there are some caveats to this such as ssl content checks etc...
[4] http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/cxsr/400/index.shtml







----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jay Hannah" <jay at jays.net>
To: <olug at olug.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 04, 2004 10:09 AM
Subject: [olug] Border management / server farms


>
> Howdy --
>
> Here's a pie in the sky question for you...
>
> Anyone have any experience high availability web/database farms?
>
> I want to have X web servers and Y databases. I need some magical
> device that can know when server(s) in the farm(s) are offline, happily
> continuing to route requests to the other server(s) that are online.
>
> Preferrably I'd use some slice of Linux magic. Alternately, I could
> spend $10K or whatever on some device from Cisco. This is all
> hypothetical at this point, looking at options.
>
> I'm just looking for ballpark info (product names) from anyone w/ any
> experience.
>
> (Yes, I know I could load multiple DNS entries, but I don't want to
> have to wait for DNS timeout(s) if server(s) are offline.)
>
> Thanks,
>
> j
>
> _______________________________________________
> OLUG mailing list
> OLUG at olug.org
> http://lists.olug.org/mailman/listinfo/olug
>