Experience with Open Source load balancers?

Tue May 17 18:05:44 UTC 2011

We've use Linux LVS for many many years with success.
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Welch, Bryan <Bryan.Welch at arrisi.com>wrote:

> Greetings all.
>
> I've been tasked with comparing the use of open source load balancing
> software against commercially available off the shelf hardware such as F5,
> which is what we currently use.  We use the load balancers for traditional
> load balancing, full proxy for http/ssl traffic, ssl termination and
> certificate management, ssl and http header manipulation, nat, high
> availability of the physical hardware and stateful failover of the tcp
> sessions.  These units will be placed at the customer prem supporting our
> applications and services and we'll need to support them accordingly.
>
> Now my "knee jerk" reaction to this is that it's a really bad idea.  It is
> the heart and soul of our data center network after all.  However, once I
> started to think about it I realized that I hadn't had any real experience
> with this solution beyond tinkering with it at home and reading about it in
> years past.
>
> Can anyone offer any operational insight and real world experiences with
> these solutions?
>
> TIA, replies off list are welcomed.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Bryan
>
>

-- 
~Jeff

"It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points how the strong man
stumbled or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit
belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by
dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly...who knows the great
enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause; who,
at best, knows the triumph of high achievement; and who, at the worst, if he
fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be
with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

Theodore Roosevelt (1858 - 1919), "Man in the Arena" Speech given April 23,
1910