[techtalk] HA/Virtual Server solutions?

[curious]

interms of free solutions I would look into
heartbeat:http://www.linux-ha.org/download/
(basicly it's fake (http://www.us.vergenet.net/linux/fake/) with nifty
monitoring features.. there is alot of good documentation out there that
explanes utilizing arpspoofing in HA environments... my first
recommendation is to study these till you understand it (it's actualy alot
simpler then it looks at first glance :) ) {high level: if a box goes down
another box on the same subnet becomes the box that went down}
www.linux-ha.org has lots of links to HA stuff.. 
since I'm not sure what all the issues involved in what your after.. your
best solution might also be to get or build a load balancer (look into
port forwarding) {high level: a load balancer is basicly a router that
distributes traffic across systems based on whatever ratio you assign it..
if you want to use a loadbalancer for failover you would set your main box
to 100% traffic and your backup to 0% when the loadbalancer can't reach
the main box it will use the backup box}

http://www.LinuxVirtualServer.org/ is a good site on HA as well with more
of a load balance approach.. (though it looks like you've already found
them :) )

in terms of commercial load balancing companies:
http://www.internetwk.com/indepth/indepth012400-1.htm
has alot of names and company histories.. 

the best way to learn loadbalancing might be to just set up three boxes..
a loadbalance box and two webservers.. conceptualy it might be easyist to
set up the linux box to Masq the two boxes.. then setup portfw for each of
the webservers.. personaly I've only used portfw to work around screwy
protocols.. but from the documentation I've run across it seems like it
would be very trivial to add weights or metrics or whatver it uses :)

for me.. when something seems daunting I basicly just build whatever it is
in a lab till I understand it.. then it's no longer daunting.. (and infact
can be quite boring :) )


ok.. peace :)


 /"\  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 
 \ /   ASCII Ribbon Campaign      curious at curious.org
  X   - NO HTML/RTF in e-mail     http://www.curious.org/
 / \  - NO Word docs in e-mail    "This quote is false." -anon

On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, Shane Landrum wrote:

> Hi all----
> 
> So I started a new job with a company that does lots of work with open source
> solutions, which is fun. One of the first tasks I've been put up to is
> researching clustering technology for a client. The client has a cluster of
> VA Linux webservers that are currently set up with round-robin DNS; they want a
> more robust solution that'll route traffic away from dead webservers and do
> load-balancing among the servers that are up. I've never touched clustering
> technology, and this is a bit daunting to me. 
> 
> Can anyone recommend which software/packages/vendors I should look at
> or stay away from? For example, I've been warned away from piranha because of
> security issues in recent versions. Or, for that matter, can anyone tell
> me what's behind the various cluster/HA products on the commercial market?
> Most of them look like packaged versions of the LVS project's tools.
> 
> So far, I've looked at Understudy
> (http://www.polyserve.com/prod_overview.html) and at packages that various
> Linux vendors offer (Redhat, TurboLinux). I'm also looking at Ultramonkey,
> which seems to be a decent noncommercial package of the Linux Virtual Server
> project's tools.  How much of a pain is it to set up clustering with any of
> these, and which tools offer the best feature set?
> 
> TIA,
> srl
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
> Shane R. Landrum + srl at ainnovations.com + Software/Systems Engineer
> ------------------ www.ainnovations.com ----- Anansi Innovations --
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> techtalk mailing list
> techtalk at linuxchix.org
> http://www.linux.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/techtalk
>