Load balancers

[doodab]

Righty.

I need a load balancer for use in a development environment. It doesn't need whopping throughput or gigabit ports, it's purely to allow me to develop and test something with HA & clustering capabilities and verify that it actually works. It needs to work at the TCP level and support stickiness.

Budget = cheaper the better.

I am currently thinking I can do this with a cheapish Cisco router (1841 or similar) cos IOS does everything. Am I on the right track?

[doodab]

If I can do it in IOS, I can probably use dynamips.

[stek]

RRDNS?

[doodab]

RRDNS?

That would handle load balancing but there are persistent client connections that need to fail over transparently in a HA scenario, so we need to present a single IP.

[petergriffin]

Righty.

I need a load balancer for use in a development environment.

How familiar are you with OpenBds? It has load balancing capabilities by default. I remember reading an Openbsd manual circa 2003 about this thing. PermieCo. was running OpenBsd on server, cool stuff.

Just fetch a cheap PC rotting in the basement, it will do the job. You don't even need a hard drive, it can run from a cheap USB drive. No need for users and /home directory, the whole thing will run from /sbin/init.

Good thing of OpenBds, they kept the old venerable init.

[smatty]

I'd not heard of Ciscos IOS load balancing, from a quick browse on their site seems it only works on 6500s & 7600s.

There used to be an F5 image you could download and run in a VM, no idea if it still exists.

Must be some free Linux/BSD based load balancers around.

[stek]

I'd not heard of Ciscos IOS load balancing, from a quick browse on their site seems it only works on 6500s & 7600s.

There used to be an F5 image you could download and run in a VM, no idea if it still exists.

Must be some free Linux/BSD based load balancers around.

Think Doods means VIPs and stick sessions on Cats but I'm in interview mode here...

[doodab]

Think Doods means VIPs and stick sessions on Cats but I'm in interview mode here...

I think that might be what I meant. I was kind of hoping a £100 router off ebay would do it but it seems that you need quite an expensive switch.

I will have a google for this F5 vm & open BSD. Thanks for the tips.

BTW does anyone know what the score is with licensing the F5 boxes 2nd hand? If I buy a cheap one will it basically work or will I need to give F5 money?