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

[Jay Faulkner]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: lvs-users-bounces at linuxvirtualserver.org [mailto:lvs-users-
> bounces at linuxvirtualserver.org] On Behalf Of Siim Põder
> Sent: Friday, November 20, 2009 8:42 AM
> To: LinuxVirtualServer.org users mailing list.
> Subject: [lvs-users] LVS vs commercial LB in critical environment
> 
> 
> 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.
> 

Siim, 

I assure you that LVS is production quality. Just like any application, it has it's quirks, but so do commercial LBs. Paying for a load balancer just because it "seems like" it would be better is a fallacy. Everything has it's positives and negatives. LVS (via keepalived) is a huge part of the infrastructure I work on daily, and it's always been reliable.

If you have any specific concerns, please post them -- the generic "is open source good enough for production" question... I'm just surprised to still see it. Hasn't Apache, Linux, and other, almost standard open source technologies killed off that argument?

Jason Faulkner
Linux Engineer, Rackspace Email & Apps