[lvs-users] deciding among load balancers

[Graeme Fowler]

Hi

On Tue, 2008-02-12 at 10:19 -0800, thushara wijeratna wrote:
> I'm trying to decide between LVS and nginx for a load balancing
> solution for a site with predicted high traffic - (say 10K HTTP
> requests per second). I'm familiar with nginx as a reverse proxy /
> image server. I have no familiarity with LVS. Do you think LVS has key
> advantages
> missing in nginx? If so, I would play with it to see how it fits our needs.

LVS has several advantages over nginx, the principal one being that it
*isn't* a webserver. It's a load-balancing framework, pure and simple.
Whether you want web, mail, DB, SSH, some_other_app is irrelevant - it
can probably be done.

It isn't a proxy, it's an application-agnostic router with features
allowing several different types of load balancing algorithm, method,
and scheduling.

> [Is it correct that LVS provides failover semantics as well? Because
> as far as I can tell, nginx doesn't, to get around this, we use DNS
> based mechanism so we have more than one nginx server registered, but
> of course this is less than ideal]

LVS in and of itself does not provide failover; there are several tools
available which provide healthcheck and failover capability which allow
you to manage both your load balancers themselves and the "real" servers
they're talking to.

Graeme