nate wrote:
I'm running a pair of squids as an internal cache for some intermediate data used by a web server farm and currently doing failover by going through an F5 bigip. However, I'd like to avoid the bigip and use heartbeat since there are only two machines. I don't need to sync any
I use bigip even if there is only 1 machine, using heartbeat sounds like it will make it quite a bit more complicated, load balancers make life easier..since you already have a good one(a pair hopefully), keep using it!
We have a lot of other equipment behind it and I want the capacity for growth in the other pools. I agree it does a good job and is hard to match where you need balancing, but this only needs failover.
I use load balancers wherever possible even with 1 machine so I can make changes to the system(s) in the pool without impact. e.g. if I want to replace hardware, I can install the new hardware, add it to the pool and remove the old system. Of course it's ideal to always have at least 2.
A floating IP should serve the same purpose if you can swap it cleanly.