Load Sharing and Balancing

Load balancing of certain services, such as ftp or web serving, is a must for any organization that needs to service a large client base. In this field, the Linux Virtual Server Project has stepped up as the leader for load sharing and balancing in Linux clusters.

This page will point you towards various software projects which implement load sharing and balancing solutions.

• Alinka Oranges: Alinka's Oranges Software provides High Availability and Load Balancing capabilities as well as ease of configuration and management of the cluster.



• Keepalived: Keepalived adds a strong and robust keepalive facility the the Linux Virtual Server Project. If you are implementing LVS, you can add the monitoring of keepalived to increase the availability of your cluster.



• Linux Virtual Server: LVS has become the leader in the field of linux load sharing and balancing. There are other products, but most of them implement some version of LVS.



• LVSM: Linux Virtual Server Manager is a package designed to simplify the creation and management of LVS based clusters. LVSM is developed and sponsored by Penguin Computing.



• Red Hat High Availability Server: While development seems to have stopped on this project, and it appears that it is not longer available, this is the basis for the Cluster Manager software that is now included in Red Hat Advanced Server distribution.



• Turbolinux Cluster Server: Turbolinux Cluster Server quickly detects and recovers hardware and software failures, to allow for uninterrupted load balancing solutions.



• Ultra Monkey: Ultra Monkey is based on LVS, and focuses on created load balanced, highly available services on a local area network. At this stage in its development, Ultra Monkey is focusing on producing a scalable, highly available web farm, though it can be easily expanded to other services, such as FTP or e-mail.

• The High Availability Linux Project: Linux-HA is the home of the "heartbeat" code that is used for the highly available aspects of many load sharing and balancing cluster software packages.



• Linux Network Address Translation Project: This page provides an assortment of links and information related to NAT from around the Internet.



• Linux Scalability Project: The primary goal of the Linux Scalability Project is to improve the scalability and robustness of Linux to support greater network server workloads more reliably. Specific interest is geared towards single-system scalability, performance, and reliability of network server infrastructure products, such as LDAP directory servers, IMAP e-mail servers, and web servers, among others.