Dual load balancer (one failsafe)?

[mike]

Yeah - I use LVS right now with ldirectord to do healthchecking.

I used to run it using heartbeat (v1 I believe) but right now I am not
even running it in active/passive mode.

I believe FreeBSD also has it's equivalents (VRRP?) and the Wordpress
guys just mentioned another product which probably can replace the
need for heartbeat called Wackamole
(http://www.backhand.org/wackamole/)

As long as you keep your nginx configs synced up and make sure to
reload them after changes, the only thing you should need is something
to manage taking over the IPs for you; and I believe Wackamole might
be a good solution for that. LVS won't help you with IP management
without adding in heartbeat, it is simply a layer 4 load balancing
solution.

I would look at doing 2 nginx installs, a small custom script to keep
the configs in sync, and Wackamole to manage the IP switching. In
theory Wackamole sounds like it can handle a ton of machines so you
could have multiple - not just a single active/passive pair...


On 6/15/08, Alexander Staubo <alex at bengler.no> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 6:52 AM, Floren Munteanu <nginx at yqed.com> wrote:
> > What to do, use HaProxy or the built-in nginx balancer?
>
> Stick with Nginx if you are already familiar with it and you are using
> it for serving your PHP. There's no need to complicate things with yet
> another new component. I think HAProxy is a much better load balancer,
> but there are pros and cons to both approaches.
>
> You might want to check out layer 4 load-balancing as an option. The
> LVS project, of which Heartbeat is a part, also offers the IPVS
> system, which can load-balance network traffic to multiple nodes at
> the layer 4, ie. by distributing network traffic at the packet level.
>
> This is simpler and more limited than the kind of fancy HTTP magic
> that Nginx and HAProxy can do, but it's much faster since there no
> proxying involved. Here's a howto (based on Heartbeat 2, which you
> might want to avoid):
>
>  http://www.novell.com/communities/node/4846/load-balancing-howto-lvs-ldirectord-heartbeat-2