Viability of nginx instead of hardware load balancer?

[John Moore]

David Murphy wrote:
> Not sure if this is possible ( as I haven't tried it) but what about
> building  nginx on Damn Small Linux and having a boot cd  or ramdisk, or
> even  boot flash.  You could literally take   something like  a    PowerEdge
> 1425 or so and have a kicking minimalistic   LB  hardware running on nginx. 
>
>
>   
Yes, that's a good idea. Is DSL the best distro for such things?
> 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). 
> You would then have a fully redundant LB system so if nginx on one node
> crashes   the fail over would route all traffic  to  the other  LB. 
>
>   
I hadn't thought to explore the possibility of virtualization. That's 
given me some good foood for thought, thanks.

J