I am looking for some recommendations for an inexpensive load balancing
appliance that can do High Availability failover.
This only needs to do simple load balancing.  No ssl, no reading into the
headers, no fancy algorithms just plain round robin with some health monitors
of the pool members.


Regards,

Pippin Wallace
Hosting Administrator
RightNow Technologies

Pound is the best inexpensive solution. Its quite elegant as well to
operate. 

I don't know what your budget is, Foundry Server Irons are around $12k. I
can recommend them as hardware load balancers.


Thank you,
Kiriki Delany 

-----Original Message-----
From: Wallace, Pippin [mailto:pwallace(at)rightnow.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 9:55 AM
To: pound(at)apsis.ch
Subject: [Pound Mailing List] Load balance appliance recommendations

I am looking for some recommendations for an inexpensive load balancing
appliance that can do High Availability failover.
This only needs to do simple load balancing.  No ssl, no reading into the
headers, no fancy algorithms just plain round robin with some health
monitors of the pool members.


Regards,

Pippin Wallace
Hosting Administrator
RightNow Technologies



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To unsubscribe send an email with subject 'unsubscribe' to pound(at)apsis.ch.
Please contact roseg(at)apsis.ch for questions.
http://www.apsis.ch/pound/pound_list/archive/2007/2007-05/1178038486000

The two standard HTTP load balancing answers are haproxy and pound.  HAProxy
has a history of higher performance (in terms of raw bits per second) and
better HA failover mechanisms.  Pound has much better control over who gets
which request.  Pound is also more portable.

Over time, HAProxy has gained more control and Pound has gained considerably
in terms of performance.  Pound is also gaining some HA control (the recent
grace period for shutdown is a great example).

Since you are talking about simple round-robin, losing session state isn't a
big deal.  That probably means that pound would work just fine.  Both
solutions would have very low average failure rate which definitely makes
the failover problem much easier.  The transaction failure rate due to
configuration changes and system updates is likely to be much higher.

Good luck!


On 5/1/07 9:54 AM, "Wallace, Pippin" <pwallace(at)rightnow.com> wrote:

> I am looking for some recommendations for an inexpensive load balancing
> appliance that can do High Availability failover.
> This only needs to do simple load balancing.  No ssl, no reading into the
> headers, no fancy algorithms just plain round robin with some health monitors
> of the pool members.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Pippin Wallace
> Hosting Administrator
> RightNow Technologies
> 
> 
> 
> --
> To unsubscribe send an email with subject 'unsubscribe' to pound(at)apsis.ch.
> Please contact roseg(at)apsis.ch for questions.
> http://www.apsis.ch/pound/pound_list/archive/2007/2007-05/1178038486000

We are an F5 shop but their cheap HA pair is $30k and for this minimal
arrangement we are looking to keep the pair price under $10K.

Is that the pair price for the Foundry server?

-----Original Message-----
From: Kiriki Delany [mailto:kiriki(at)streamguys.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 11:17 AM
To: pound(at)apsis.ch
Subject: RE: [Pound Mailing List] Load balance appliance recommendations

Pound is the best inexpensive solution. Its quite elegant as well to
operate. 

I don't know what your budget is, Foundry Server Irons are around $12k. I
can recommend them as hardware load balancers.


Thank you,
Kiriki Delany 

-----Original Message-----
From: Wallace, Pippin [mailto:pwallace(at)rightnow.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 9:55 AM
To: pound(at)apsis.ch
Subject: [Pound Mailing List] Load balance appliance recommendations

I am looking for some recommendations for an inexpensive load balancing
appliance that can do High Availability failover.
This only needs to do simple load balancing.  No ssl, no reading into the
headers, no fancy algorithms just plain round robin with some health
monitors of the pool members.


Regards,

Pippin Wallace
Hosting Administrator
RightNow Technologies



-- 
To unsubscribe send an email with subject 'unsubscribe' to pound(at)apsis.ch.
Please contact roseg(at)apsis.ch for questions.
http://www.apsis.ch/pound/pound_list/archive/2007/2007-05/1178038486000


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To unsubscribe send an email with subject 'unsubscribe' to pound(at)apsis.ch.
Please contact roseg(at)apsis.ch for questions.
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> I am looking for some recommendations for an inexpensive load balancing
> appliance that can do High Availability failover.
> This only needs to do simple load balancing.  No ssl, no reading into the
> headers, no fancy algorithms just plain round robin with some health
> monitors of the pool members.

2x 1U intel servers with 1G of ram, intel nics, whatever disk ~ $2k.

Use OpenBSD, with carp, for failover.  Pound provides the load balancing 
services.

It's really pretty easy.  You could even use an old desktop system 
depending on your traffic levels.

PS - There are many options here - this is just an approximation of my 
setup, which works well.

Regards,
-- 
Dave Steinberg
http://www.geekisp.com/
http://www.steinbergcomputing.com/

Ted, thank you for the feedback.  Can either of these solutions do session
mirroring so that if you have a planned failover you do not loose and
connections?

-----Original Message-----
From: Ted Dunning [mailto:tdunning(at)veoh.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 11:35 AM
To: pound(at)apsis.ch
Subject: Re: [Pound Mailing List] Load balance appliance recommendations


The two standard HTTP load balancing answers are haproxy and pound.  HAProxy
has a history of higher performance (in terms of raw bits per second) and
better HA failover mechanisms.  Pound has much better control over who gets
which request.  Pound is also more portable.

Over time, HAProxy has gained more control and Pound has gained considerably
in terms of performance.  Pound is also gaining some HA control (the recent
grace period for shutdown is a great example).

Since you are talking about simple round-robin, losing session state isn't a
big deal.  That probably means that pound would work just fine.  Both
solutions would have very low average failure rate which definitely makes
the failover problem much easier.  The transaction failure rate due to
configuration changes and system updates is likely to be much higher.

Good luck!


On 5/1/07 9:54 AM, "Wallace, Pippin" <pwallace(at)rightnow.com> wrote:

> I am looking for some recommendations for an inexpensive load balancing
> appliance that can do High Availability failover.
> This only needs to do simple load balancing.  No ssl, no reading into the
> headers, no fancy algorithms just plain round robin with some health monitors
> of the pool members.
> 
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Pippin Wallace
> Hosting Administrator
> RightNow Technologies
> 
> 
> 
> --
> To unsubscribe send an email with subject 'unsubscribe' to pound(at)apsis.ch.
> Please contact roseg(at)apsis.ch for questions.
> http://www.apsis.ch/pound/pound_list/archive/2007/2007-05/1178038486000


-- 
To unsubscribe send an email with subject 'unsubscribe' to pound(at)apsis.ch.
Please contact roseg(at)apsis.ch for questions.
http://www.apsis.ch/pound/pound_list/archive/2007/2007-05/1178038486000/1178040896000

balance on a usb drive based linux system is ultra simple the hardware 
is maybe $1200 www.tigerdirect.com for two machines and would only 
take(me) an afternoon to set up .. the setup time for others will very :)

Wallace, Pippin wrote:
> We are an F5 shop but their cheap HA pair is $30k and for this minimal
arrangement we are looking to keep the pair price under $10K.
>
> Is that the pair price for the Foundry server?
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kiriki Delany [mailto:kiriki(at)streamguys.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 11:17 AM
> To: pound(at)apsis.ch
> Subject: RE: [Pound Mailing List] Load balance appliance recommendations
>
> Pound is the best inexpensive solution. Its quite elegant as well to
> operate. 
>
> I don't know what your budget is, Foundry Server Irons are around $12k. I
> can recommend them as hardware load balancers.
>
>
> Thank you,
> Kiriki Delany 
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Wallace, Pippin [mailto:pwallace(at)rightnow.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2007 9:55 AM
> To: pound(at)apsis.ch
> Subject: [Pound Mailing List] Load balance appliance recommendations
>
> I am looking for some recommendations for an inexpensive load balancing
> appliance that can do High Availability failover.
> This only needs to do simple load balancing.  No ssl, no reading into the
> headers, no fancy algorithms just plain round robin with some health
> monitors of the pool members.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Pippin Wallace
> Hosting Administrator
> RightNow Technologies
>
>
>
>   

Wallace, Pippin napisał(a):
> Ted, thank you for the feedback.  Can either of these solutions do session
mirroring so that if you have a planned failover you do not loose and
connections?
> 
Haproxy supports stop services without breaking existing connections,
when You need change configuration.

Here is more informations, how to implement this

http://haproxy.1wt.eu/download/1.3/doc/haproxy-en.txt

- 1.6) Helping process management
- 2.4) Soft stop

But if You would like to migrate it to another host(fe. with heartbeat
package), You need to write right scripts.

Best Regards
Maciej Bogucki

>> Ted, thank you for the feedback.  Can either of these solutions do session
mirroring so that if you have a planned failover you do not loose and
connections?
>>
>>     
> All the low end commercial solutions do this, Coyote Point, Loadbalancer.org,
WebMux and Kemp
>   
Coyote is a FreeBSD based proxy the other three are based on LVS.

Regards,
Malcolm.