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My favorite (the name seals the deal for me) is http://www.ultramonkey.org/

It's probably more complicated and overkill for what the poster needs, but it worked great for us. We used this years ago for transaction processing (~100,000 transactions an hour, not too busy) on a couple old HP NetServers with 1GB RAM each.

He's apparently not asking for compile farm...

Author did fail to say what the purpose was, but here are some good starts.

Apache cluster
MySQL cluster (should also refer to mysql.com resources)
Ultra monkey, heartbeat and the like can make cluster as well.

the equivalent that we were looking at would be a 3rd party package:

http://www.ultramonkey.org/

we decided to use freebsd CARP because:

1) it is built in, has very simple/minimal config and then "just works"
2) i really like freebsd and already run it on other boxes due to preference
3) pf is a really nice firewall to work with since it is very simple with clean readable syntax and great features (not that i'm any expert on the latter)

on the other hand, ultramonkey has a different architecture and is capable of more than CARP. there are probably setups where CARP wouldn't be an option, but ultramonkey might do the job.

My point about static content was that if his content is static, he can avoid having shared storage. No shared storage significantly reduces the price tag. The problem of using a NetApp or similar is the single point of failure. The cheapest possible way with shared storage would be a 2 box nfs server cluster with shared scsi. Finding hardware that is reliable for this can be problematic. LSI Logic MegaRAID (perc 3) is usable and not too expensive... I built one cluster that used AFS, but distributed file systems just don't cut it yet.

Saru is a package that allows active active load balancers (lvs linux directors).
With active active, there is no single point of failure in the lvs, as the lvs directors load balance themselvs and share state.
The really nice thing here is that in some cluster layouts, the LVS directors are the real servers. All the boxes load balance without the need of a dedicated lvs directors and with no bottleneck or single point of failure.

http://www.ultramonkey.org/
http://www.ultramonkey.org/papers/active_active/
http://www.ultramonkey.org/papers/active_active/ac tive_active.shtml

If you know of any other active-active LVS let me know.

My point about static content was that if his content is static, he can avoid having shared storage. No shared storage significantly reduces the price tag. The problem of using a NetApp or similar is the single point of failure. The cheapest possible way with shared storage would be a 2 box nfs server cluster with shared scsi. Finding hardware that is reliable for this can be problematic. LSI Logic MegaRAID (perc 3) is usable and not too expensive... I built one cluster that used AFS, but distributed file systems just don't cut it yet.

Saru is a package that allows active active load balancers (lvs linux directors).
With active active, there is no single point of failure in the lvs, as the lvs directors load balance themselvs and share state.
The really nice thing here is that in some cluster layouts, the LVS directors are the real servers. All the boxes load balance without the need of a dedicated lvs directors and with no bottleneck or single point of failure.

http://www.ultramonkey.org/
http://www.ultramonkey.org/papers/active_active/
http://www.ultramonkey.org/papers/active_active/ac tive_active.shtml

If you know of any other active-active LVS let me know.

My point about static content was that if his content is static, he can avoid having shared storage. No shared storage significantly reduces the price tag. The problem of using a NetApp or similar is the single point of failure. The cheapest possible way with shared storage would be a 2 box nfs server cluster with shared scsi. Finding hardware that is reliable for this can be problematic. LSI Logic MegaRAID (perc 3) is usable and not too expensive... I built one cluster that used AFS, but distributed file systems just don't cut it yet.

Saru is a package that allows active active load balancers (lvs linux directors).
With active active, there is no single point of failure in the lvs, as the lvs directors load balance themselvs and share state.
The really nice thing here is that in some cluster layouts, the LVS directors are the real servers. All the boxes load balance without the need of a dedicated lvs directors and with no bottleneck or single point of failure.

http://www.ultramonkey.org/
http://www.ultramonkey.org/papers/active_active/
http://www.ultramonkey.org/papers/active_active/ac tive_active.shtml

If you know of any other active-active LVS let me know.

LVS on linux can be configured for maximum throughput through the network as return traffic does not pass back through the director. You can install a pair of directors that sync state in case one fails.

Load balancing can be also be done with iptables. See also this thread on the netfilter mailing list.

Pardon me, but UltraMonkey
has been around for a Long
time. Horms
rocks!

Pardon me, but UltraMonkey
has been around for a Long
time. Horms
rocks!

They have different configurations explained here:
http://www.ultramonkey.org/3/topologies/

They even have an example where 2 machines act as both real servers and directors:
http://www.ultramonkey.org/3/topologies/sl-ha-lb-o verview.html

They have different configurations explained here:
http://www.ultramonkey.org/3/topologies/

They even have an example where 2 machines act as both real servers and directors:
http://www.ultramonkey.org/3/topologies/sl-ha-lb-o verview.html

You can have more directors:
http://www.ultramonkey.org/papers/active_active/ac tive_active.shtml

At my work we use Ultramonkey with LVS-kiss and Mon.

Our hardware infrastructure includes 2 load-balancers running in a failover system with 3 web servers in the backend (1.8ghz, 512ram, 40gig hdd, 100mbps network) systems. That hosts over 60 million page views a month, it also supports real-time failover. For monitoring there are tools out there that use MRTG/RRD for cluster statistics.

Here are some links to some load balancing projects I'm aware of:

• lbnamed - A load balancer written in Perl
• Super Sparrow - A Linux-based load balancer
• Ultra Monkey - A high-availability and load balancer solution based on Linux (it looks like Super Sparrow may be Ultra Monkey's load balancer)
• LVS - A high-availability and load balancer solution based on Linux