Re: [cobalt-users] Load Balancing Cobalts ?

["Marc Gear" <marcg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

there are two main types of load balancing you can have, software, and
hardware, what sort are you after?

for software i recommend Resonate, which sells loadbalancing
software.(http://www.resonate.com) they have a free version availiable, but
you might have to pay for the source so you can compile it

If you are not so concerned with failsafes, like machines going down, a
simple cheap way to balance the load on your servers is with round-robin
dns, just add more than one A record for the domain:

www.yourdomain.com.   in      a       10.0.0.10
www.yourdomain.com.   in      a       10.0.0.11
www.yourdomain.com.   in      a       10.0.0.12

And this should cycle throught the ip addresses creating a kind of
loadbalancing effect. If one host goes down though people will start not
being able to reach it when it rotates to the ip address of that host.

A step up from RRDNS is the Linux Virtual Server Project
(http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/) but i dont think this has the nice gui
front end you get from resonate.

as far as the hardware/router solution goes there are several availiable -
we are currently testing the Big IP system from F5,
(http://www.e-business.com/products/big-ip.htm) but this is probably
overkill for a couple of raq3/4, not to mind that its an extreemly expensive
option. Cisco do plenty of hardware solutions
(http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/cxsr/400/index.shtml) but these are
probably even more expensive

Tons of useful information on www.loadbalancing.net
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