[CentOS] Load balancing...

Fri Mar 4 19:28:07 UTC 2011
Rudi Ahlers <Rudi at SoftDux.com>

On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 9:18 PM, James Nguyen <james at callfire.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 9:34 AM, Todd <slackmoehrle.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Brian,
>> Thanks for all of the great words here. I appreciate the detail in your
>> reply.
>>>
>>> OK, so what's good?  For my requirements, HAProxy is excellent.  It
>>> handled sticky sessions well, performs monitoring of each host, allows
>>> dynamic adding/removing of servers, as well as maintenance modes.
>>> It's very easy to install and configure.  I'm using is as the backend
>>> to apache that is acting as an SSL termination point.  It's been very
>>> high performing for us and I know a lot of big sites use it as well.
>>> The only question I would have with it is handling of video, as we
>>> only use it for typical web traffic, just high bandwidth stuff like
>>> that.
>>>
>>> Also, make sure any load balancer you have is redundant and has some
>>> kind of failover, using something like pacemaker, heartbeat, etc...
>>
>> Can you outline a bit specs for building a homemade box to run HAProxy? The
>> HAProxy site is very extensive, but I did not see ideal specs at a quick
>> glance. I will read in depth this weekend.
>> Minimal specs and they excellent specs if you have thoughts.. I really don't
>> have an idea how intensive a task like this is. Nobody needs to log into the
>> box, simply use the box for this purpose.
>> -Jason
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>>
>>
>
> You want two boxes that run both haproxy + keepalived.  This way you
> get the load balancing (HAProxy) plus the high availability
> (Keepalived) using a shared virtual IP for your two boxes.  You can do
> maintenance on either one while traffic still remains active.
>
> I don't have metrics to spec out the boxes, but given your traffic
> load you mentioned you don't need hefty boxes at all.  Just get
> yourself a box with some Gigabit interfaces which I'm sure they all
> are these days.  A single socket with 4 cores is more than enough.
> You can probably even do with 2 cores.  Someone can correct me on that
> if they think the solution requires a lot of CPU.  Memory wise I think
> machines come with at least 4Gb these days.  That should do.  You can
> probably both boxes for around 2k?
>
> You already know how much F5 or any of those guys cost per device. =)
>
> Best,
> --
> James H. Nguyen
> CallFire :: Systems Architect
> http://www.callfire.com
> 1.949.625.4263
> _______________________________________________



How well will this setup work as a load balancer for a couple of web
servers, running cPanel / VirtualMin and a few hundred websites
sharing the same IP on each server?



-- 
Kind Regards
Rudi Ahlers
SoftDux

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