Viability of nginx instead of hardware load balancer?

[David Murphy]

Gena, 

Regarding ESX  you are completely wrong, as I mentioned each VM would be on
their own HOST which means a  the entire cluster would have to fail  to
cause the LB to not switch over.
Also  DSL has been ported to 2.6 also.  To be  100% accurate DSL = 2.4
while DSL-N = 2.6
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/dsl-n/


I was mentioning the cost  difference in regards to building your own
hardware based  solution using a nginx  setup as your LB versus  paying for
hardware. To show how he could use   nginx  in an appliance manner . This
would yield a better ROI and allow for more   fail over.

Please read more closely when making assumptions one  SPF , as you could
very easily send the wrong impression to someone who is new to the
virtualization space.
Since you did not include the full quote 
" Personally what I would do is  (assuming you have ESX), run 2  VM's  both
running  nginx on dedicated NICs. Then one your switching set up an
active/active fail over to those nice ( and have the VM's on separate ESX
hosts)."
Was actually what I had said.

David
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nginx at sysoev.ru [mailto:owner-nginx at sysoev.ru] On Behalf Of Gena
Makhomed
Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 3:16 PM
To: David Murphy
Subject: Re: Viability of nginx instead of hardware load balancer?

On Tuesday, September 15, 2009 at 18:19:38, David Murphy wrote:

DM> Not sure if this is possible ( as I haven't tried it) but what about 
DM> building  nginx on Damn Small Linux and having a boot cd  or 
DM> ramdisk, or even  boot flash.  You could literally take
DM> something like  a   PowerEdge 1425 or so and have a kicking minimalistic
DM> LB  hardware running on nginx.

DSL - Desktop OS, linux distro for i486 with 2.4.x linux kernel, optimized
for minimal RAM usage and old computers.
no linux 2.6.x kernel - means no "epoll" at all.

therefore - DSL is totally useless for high traffic load balancer as base
OS.

DM> Technically if you were so inclined, you could even  write  DSL and 
DM> nginx to a prom chip so its  100% automated, I'm better if nginx  
DM> does everything you need it would be a lot cheaper than the hardware 
DM> normal route with the same if not better stability.

question was not about most cheaper "solution", but about "high traffic LB".

DM> Personally what I would do is  (assuming you have ESX), run 2  VM's  
DM> both running  nginx on dedicated NICs. Then one your switching set 
DM> up an active/active fail over to those nice ( and have the VM's on 
DM> separate ESX hosts).

DM> You would then have a fully redundant LB system so if nginx on one 
DM> node crashes the fail over would route all traffic  to  the other  LB.

if, for example, crashes mainboard of esx server with these VM's - both VM's
go down. so, this is not "a fully redundant LB system".

hardware of ESX server is "single point of failure".

--
Best regards,
 Gena