On 6/05/2008, at 1:21 PM, Joe Abley wrote:
On 5 May 2008, at 20:50, Nathan Ward wrote:
Perhaps what would make more sense here is Foundry (F5, etc.) building an anycast feature - anycast prefixes are withdrawn when a cluster relying on that anycast prefix goes below a threshold.
I'm not sure exactly what feature is required, here. f5s of my acquaintance are already very capable of making OSPF LSAs based on virtual servers' pools being non-empty. Do it on more than one f5 in the same area, and you're anycasting service availability with the current feature set.
Can they do it with BGP for Internet anycast?
The general reason why people prefer to find alternative solutions rather than use dedicated load-balancers are that the dedicated load- balancers are hellishly more expensive than the $5 gigabit switch you probably already have in your garage.
The dedicated load balancers also talk BGP (well, ones I've played with), so that does away with the need for a BGP speaking router. -- Nathan Ward