[CentOS] simple load balancing/failover for OWA

Fri Apr 4 03:07:34 UTC 2008
Ruslan Sivak <rsivak at istandfor.com>

We are building an exchange cluster with two front end Outlook Web 
Access servers.  We would like to at least have some sort of failover, 
and prefereably load balancing for them.

The MS recommended way is to use NLB, but for various reasons that's not 
working with our set up. 

We are looking to set up a single linux server and use something like 
LVS to load balance/fail over the connections. 

Looking at LVS, it looks like it hasn't been updated in a while.  Is it 
stable?  Is it still the preferred solution?  Since OWA has sessions, 
but no session replication, we would need something that can keep 
directing the same client to the same server (either by IP, or 
preferably by cookie).  Can LVS handle this?

I also saw that the latest version of Apache has some sort of load 
balancing support.  Can it be used to set something like this up?  We 
are looking for the simplest solution that won't require a lot of 
maintanence.

We understand that having a single LVS box creates a single point of 
failure, and are willing to accept the risk for now to keep things 
simpler. 

Russ