[lvs-users] LVS vs commercial LB in critical environment

[Tomasz Chmielewski]

Siim Põder wrote:
> Hi
> 
> I have a bit of a religious question: is LVS good enough to use in
> "critical environments" (however you would feel like defining it)? We
> are currently using LVS as load balancer and netfilter as firewall in
> pretty much everywhere including several critical places (like PCI
> infrastructure) and in operations team are quite pleased with the
> functionality, performance and hackability.
> 
> However, some conservatives have raised the questions wether open
> source is dependable enough to use in situations where a lot of money
> and customers are involved and have suggested that we should be using
> F5, Citrix or Cisco instead (for load balancer, firewall and content
> inspection). Their concern is that those commercial tools would get
> much more testing (by customers) in critical infrastructure than open
> source would as open source is mostly used in less demanding places.

I always though it's the other way around: less demanding places just 
buy a Cisco router (or whatever other big name solution), run it with 
pretty much default settings, as they don't have enough IT knowledge to 
run their own, custom solution.

But yes, it's a "religious" question.

On the other hand, nobody was ever fired for buying solutions from Big 
Vendor Inc., so I guess this is where your conservatives fit in, probably.


-- 
Tomasz Chmielewski
http://wpkg.org