[CentOS] load balancer recommendations

Sat Jan 19 20:35:28 UTC 2013
Boris Epstein <borepstein at gmail.com>

Hello all,

The question is not necessarily CentOS-specific - but there are lots of
bright people on here, and - quite possibly - the final implementation will
be on CentOS hence I figured I'd ask it here. Here is the situation.

I need to configure a Linux-based network load balancer (NLB) solution. The
idea is this. Let us say I have a public facing load balancer machine with
an public IP of, say, 50.50.50.50. It is to receive the traffic (let's say,
HTTP traffic) and then route it to two private HTTP servers, let's say,
192.168.10.10 and 192.168.10.11. It has to have persistence - i.e., be
state- and session-aware. If for whatever reason one of the servers goes
down the remaining pool shares all the traffic in some fashion (be it eound
robin, saturation based, whatever).

We have tried Vyatta ( http://vyatta.org/ ) and ZeroShell (
http://www.zeroshell.org/ ) and both are very good but their NLB seems to
be externally facing (i.e., you have several internet connections and are
trying to divide your traffic between them). What we need is an "internally
facing" one, if I may say so.

Any advice on what may help us would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Boris.