jason@ifuture.com ("Jason Robertson") writes:
If you go out and spend a few thousand you can also get Allied Telesyn L2-L4 products that now support Load Balancing. Actually the rapier 24i is about $2000 Canadian. (I'd have to check the VAR pricing)
how much would i have to pay to not have that extra powered box between my data and my customers? oh, i forgot, it's zero, isn't it? re:
Using outboard appliances for "server load balancing" is unnecessary, and it adds more powered boxes (thus decreasing theoretical reliability).
If your upstream router can speak OSPF and is made by either Cisco or Juniper then it will implement ECMP (equal cost multipath). If you put your "service address" on lo0 as an alias, and you run Zebra or GateD on the "service hosts" which possess that alias address, then each such host will appear to be a router toward the service address as a "stub host" and your upstream routers will dtrt wrt flow hashing for udp or tcp traffic (that is, the udp/tcp port number will figure into the hash function, so you won't multipath your tcp sessions.)
This is how f-root has worked for years. Look ma, no appliances. -- Paul Vixie