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Product Information

The Load Balancer Add-On for Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides support for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) load balancing independent of applications. It is composed of two major components:
Linux Virtual Server (LVS), Piranha Configuration Tool, a management tool with a graphical user interface (GUI). The Load Balancer Add-On can be configured across two nodes in an active/passive configuration to provide redundant traffic management services. LVS runs on a pair of equally configured computers: an active LVS router and a backup LVS router. The active LVS router serves two roles: to balance the load across the physical servers; and to check the integrity of the services on each physical server. It does this by redirecting service requests from virtual IP addresses to the physical servers based on one of eight supported load-balancing algorithms. The backup LVS router monitors the active LVS router and takes over if it fails.

The Piranha Configuration Tool is a Web browser-based GUI tool that provides a structured approach to creating the configuration file for LVS. It offers easy and intuitive GUI-based management as an alternative to tedious manipulation of lvs.conf using a text editor.

Features

• Load balancing - The Load Balancer Add-On balances the IP load across a set of physical servers based on a preordained algorithm, thus evenly distributing the load among available servers for maximum efficiency and high availability
• Service monitoring - The virtual servers monitor the health of services running on the physical servers using send/expect scripts. If a service on a physical server malfunctions, the active LVS router stops sending jobs to that server until it returns to normal operation
• GUI-based management - Piranha offers a GUI for centralised management of both virtual and physical servers as well as for the services running on the physical servers. It also provides both configuration and monitoring tools.