local & global load balancing on the cheap

Not many people know what LVS is. I ran World Health Organization’s public website (www.who.int) using a pair of Compaq DL360 servers running Linux Virtual Server, which is an open-source load-balancer. And guess what, during SARS, we saw over 14 million hits a day at the peak. While I don’t have the specific cps / concurrent conn numbers (we didn’t measure those), the boxes did just fine.

Providing Network Services Using LVS

Use nslookup to script failure detection and trigger DNS to perform geographical failover of your servers. Neat. Geographic Failoverf or Cheapskates