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Load Balancers for Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the it'-all-a-weight-distribution-act dept.

scales asks: "We currently use the Dispatcher component of IBM's WebSphere Edge Server as a load balancer on some Red Hat boxes where I work, and the boss has asked me to look into OSS alternatives. I've already been pointed at Linux Virtual Server and Ultra Monkey, and I was wondering if any readers have had any experience with these packages, or had any opinions they could offer about other products." Ask Slashdot last visited a similar topic way back in 1999, so I think it might be time for an update.

6 of 50 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Try OpenMosix! by battjt · · Score: 5, Informative

    Mosix will migrate processes. How does that load balance 12 apache servers?

    Mosix is good for CPU intensive batch number crunching using custom software. (no shared memory, no threads, smart use of IO and sockets, etc.). Don't get me wron. I think it is very cool, just not a load balancer the way most people use the term "load balancing".

    Joe

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    Joe Batt Solid Design
  2. Ultramonkey by ChiefArcher · · Score: 5, Informative

    I used UltraMonkey way back a few years ago.. It did the job.. and we never went down.. it has i believe 4 ways you can weight the webservers.... Actually.. it does more than just webservers... which is a plus as well...

    I liked..

    ChiefArcher

  3. content balancer? by Twirlip+of+the+Mists · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'm confused. Is there some reason why this job can't best be done with a content balancer? It's been about a year since I looked at them, but last I recall Cisco's Local Directors were very highly regarded. They had intelligent session-level balancing and such, and worked well.

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    I write in my journal
  4. Redhat's load balancer by zmokhtar · · Score: 5, Informative
    Redhat has it's own LVS tools with a web interface. Very easy to setup.

    http://www.redhat.com/software/advancedserver/tech nical/piranha.html

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    Why aren't we told when editors moderate our posts?
  5. Linux Virtual Server is great by Jason+W · · Score: 4, Informative

    LVS was able to handle a medium-sized HTTP/HTTPS load at my last job quite well. It had 6 months of uptime serving 5-10 hits/second, and I literally never had to worry about it going down. In combination with mon, bringing machines up and down was never a problem, and failure situations were handled without the end user noticing.

    Installation was a bit frustrating because I hadn't dealt with the networking issues before (the ARP problem). However, in the end it was only my lack of networking knowledge that was lacking, and the ARP problem turned out to be simple to overcome.

    Support from the mailing list was great, I got thorough replies to my questions in a few hours. The documentation is good, although some parts of the HOWTO could be trimmed back a bit (more information than is needed to understand the problem, takes a bit of time to filter).

    The hardware was two slower UP boxes (one live, one for failover), and the load was esstentially 0, even with mon and MRTG running.

    LVS is of course just the load balancer, and the setup also included mon for monitoring, heartbeat for failover, and MRTG for trending. They all play well together, and create a very reliable, informative, load balancer setup.

    Depending on your setup, one of the meta-packages such as Ultra Money or Redhat's HA suite might be best, but installing the components individually isn't much of a hassle either.

  6. UltraMonkey is LVS by SwellJoe · · Score: 5, Informative
    I said it last time this came up in 1999 and I'll say it again. Ultramonkey is a combination of LVS (for balancing) and other tools (for fail detection, weighting, etc.).

    It doesn't make very much sense to say "Should I use UltraMonkey or LVS?" as the latter is a piece of the former. There are other combinations of LVS+other stuff that you might put into that sentence: "Should I use Piranha or UltraMonkey?" or "Should I use UltraMonkey or Joe Macks LVS Config scripts?" or even "Should I build my own LVS scripts or use an existing framework?"

    There are other HTTP load balancing options out there. Squid has a new branch in CVS called rproxy that handles multiple backend web servers very effectively with failure detection and other fun stuff (not to mention caching). Pound is a reverse proxy that does load balancing of HTTP traffic and SSL wrapping (most everything Squid can do for reverse proxying minus the caching features).

    Balance is a generic TCP load balancer with some nice features. The best features being that it is simple and works on more platforms than just Linux and handles more than just the HTTP protocol. It probably has some disadvantages for some situations because it operates at a lower level than the HTTP proxies above, though it can probably do lots of the same things LVS does (I don't know very much about Balance).

    Eddie is a neat framework written in Ericssons Erlang language. Seems to be dormant, but I think it is in pretty widespread use so is probably pretty stable.

    Links:

    LVS
    Squid rproxy branch
    Pound
    Balance
    Eddie