A Linux Virtual Server cluster is a highly-scalable and highly-available network service cluster built on a set of real servers. Here’s how they work, and how you can set one up yourself.
With the explosive growth of the Internet and its increasingly important role in our daily lives, traffic on the Internet is increasing dramatically, more than doubling every year. However, as demand and traffic increases, more and more sites are challenged to keep up, literally, particularly during peak periods of activity. Downtime or even delays can be disastrous, forcing customers and profits to go elsewhere. The solution? Redundancy, redundancy, and redundancy. Use hardware and software to build highly-available and highly-scalable network services.
Started in 1998, the Linux Virtual Server (LVS) project combines multiple physical servers into one virtual server, eliminating single points of failure (SPOF). Built with off-the-shelf components, LVS is already in use in some of the highest-trafficked sites on the Web. Need 24×7 service? Try 7-11 for that gallon of milk. Try LVS for your machine room.
As more and more companies move their mission-critical applications onto the Internet, the demand for always-on services is growing. So too is the need for highly-available and highly-scalable network services. Yet the requirements for always-on service are quite onerous:
* The service must scale: when the service workload increases, the system must scale up to meet the requirements.
* The service must always be on and available, despite transient partial hardware and software failures.
* The system must be cost-effective: the whole system must be economical to build and expand.
* Although the whole system may be big in physical size, it should be…
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