[techtalk] HA/Virtual Server solutions?

[Shane Landrum]

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
-- 
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Shane R. Landrum + srl at ainnovations.com + Software/Systems Engineer
------------------ www.ainnovations.com ----- Anansi Innovations --