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[lvs-users] Best Alternative to ldirectord
Okay guys, don't laugh too hard. I guess I might be the last person in the world still using ldirectord. Until recently, my attitude has been "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But I think we finally outgrew it. We currently have 1700+ virtual services (600 tomcats pointed to 1200 realservers, 500 MySQL redirections, 10 Windows terminal server services pointed to 20 realservers, and a smattering of other stuff). We've been pretty satisfied with ldirectord. It performs well, uses very little resources, but it has a few problems and it's old and unmaintained, so we're finally looking for a new solution. What's the best FOSS alternative? I've been looking at keepalived, but it seems to want haproxy as well, and the setup looks more much more complicated than ldirectord's. What's the current conventional wisdom for fast, easy, cheap (free), load balancing on Linux?


--Eric
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Re: [lvs-users] Best Alternative to ldirectord [ In reply to ]
Eric,

Keepalived is your only other decent choice when it comes to LVS.

You could stick with ldirectord and break it out onto several hosts/clusters?
Its normally just the health checking that starts becoming an issue.

You are also welcome to use our version of ldirectord in the
loadbalancer.org product (definitely supported).
Just download our demo and take a copy of ldirectord its GPL....
We just haven't got around to syncing our changes with Horms ...who is
quite often nice enough to fix our broken code :-).

Ps. You might find our Windows feedback agent useful for the terminal
servers (also open source)- its compatible with Ldirectord & HAProxy
http://blog.loadbalancer.org/open-source-windows-service-for-reporting-server-load-back-to-haproxy-load-balancer-feedback-agent/




On 7 August 2015 at 03:44, Eric Robinson <eric.robinson@psmnv.com> wrote:
> Okay guys, don't laugh too hard. I guess I might be the last person in the world still using ldirectord. Until recently, my attitude has been "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But I think we finally outgrew it. We currently have 1700+ virtual services (600 tomcats pointed to 1200 realservers, 500 MySQL redirections, 10 Windows terminal server services pointed to 20 realservers, and a smattering of other stuff). We've been pretty satisfied with ldirectord. It performs well, uses very little resources, but it has a few problems and it's old and unmaintained, so we're finally looking for a new solution. What's the best FOSS alternative? I've been looking at keepalived, but it seems to want haproxy as well, and the setup looks more much more complicated than ldirectord's. What's the current conventional wisdom for fast, easy, cheap (free), load balancing on Linux?
>
>
> --Eric
> _______________________________________________
> Please read the documentation before posting - it's available at:
> http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/
>
> LinuxVirtualServer.org mailing list - lvs-users@LinuxVirtualServer.org
> Send requests to lvs-users-request@LinuxVirtualServer.org
> or go to http://lists.graemef.net/mailman/listinfo/lvs-users



--
Regards,

Malcolm Turnbull.

Loadbalancer.org Ltd.
Phone: +44 (0)330 1604540
http://www.loadbalancer.org/

_______________________________________________
Please read the documentation before posting - it's available at:
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

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Send requests to lvs-users-request@LinuxVirtualServer.org
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Re: [lvs-users] Best Alternative to ldirectord [ In reply to ]
Thank you very much for the reply, and please forgive my top posting. I am using the Office365 web access to email at the moment, and it makes me look like a churl in newsgroups.

The thing that confuses me at the moment is the required product mix if I use keepalived. Right now I'm using the Corosync+Pacemaker+LVS+lidirectord stack. If I switch to keepalived, how much does that replace, and why? From reading the keepalived docs (which appear to be a decade old) it would seem that keepalived wants to be a do-it-all solution, so I guess I'd have to throw away what I know about Corosync and Pacemaker? And is HAproxy really necessary?

--Eric

________________________________________
From: lvs-users-bounces@linuxvirtualserver.org <lvs-users-bounces@linuxvirtualserver.org> on behalf of Malcolm Turnbull <malcolm@loadbalancer.org>
Sent: Friday, August 7, 2015 12:39 AM
To: LinuxVirtualServer.org users mailing list.
Subject: Re: [lvs-users] Best Alternative to ldirectord

Eric,

Keepalived is your only other decent choice when it comes to LVS.

You could stick with ldirectord and break it out onto several hosts/clusters?
Its normally just the health checking that starts becoming an issue.

You are also welcome to use our version of ldirectord in the
loadbalancer.org product (definitely supported).
Just download our demo and take a copy of ldirectord its GPL....
We just haven't got around to syncing our changes with Horms ...who is
quite often nice enough to fix our broken code :-).

Ps. You might find our Windows feedback agent useful for the terminal
servers (also open source)- its compatible with Ldirectord & HAProxy
http://blog.loadbalancer.org/open-source-windows-service-for-reporting-server-load-back-to-haproxy-load-balancer-feedback-agent/




On 7 August 2015 at 03:44, Eric Robinson <eric.robinson@psmnv.com> wrote:
> Okay guys, don't laugh too hard. I guess I might be the last person in the world still using ldirectord. Until recently, my attitude has been "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But I think we finally outgrew it. We currently have 1700+ virtual services (600 tomcats pointed to 1200 realservers, 500 MySQL redirections, 10 Windows terminal server services pointed to 20 realservers, and a smattering of other stuff). We've been pretty satisfied with ldirectord. It performs well, uses very little resources, but it has a few problems and it's old and unmaintained, so we're finally looking for a new solution. What's the best FOSS alternative? I've been looking at keepalived, but it seems to want haproxy as well, and the setup looks more much more complicated than ldirectord's. What's the current conventional wisdom for fast, easy, cheap (free), load balancing on Linux?
>
>
> --Eric
> _______________________________________________
> Please read the documentation before posting - it's available at:
> http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/
>
> LinuxVirtualServer.org mailing list - lvs-users@LinuxVirtualServer.org
> Send requests to lvs-users-request@LinuxVirtualServer.org
> or go to http://lists.graemef.net/mailman/listinfo/lvs-users



--
Regards,

Malcolm Turnbull.

Loadbalancer.org Ltd.
Phone: +44 (0)330 1604540
http://www.loadbalancer.org/

_______________________________________________
Please read the documentation before posting - it's available at:
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

LinuxVirtualServer.org mailing list - lvs-users@LinuxVirtualServer.org
Send requests to lvs-users-request@LinuxVirtualServer.org
or go to http://lists.graemef.net/mailman/listinfo/lvs-users

_______________________________________________
Please read the documentation before posting - it's available at:
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

LinuxVirtualServer.org mailing list - lvs-users@LinuxVirtualServer.org
Send requests to lvs-users-request@LinuxVirtualServer.org
or go to http://lists.graemef.net/mailman/listinfo/lvs-users
Re: [lvs-users] Best Alternative to ldirectord [ In reply to ]
Am 07.08.2015 10:47 schrieb "Eric Robinson" <eric.robinson@psmnv.com>:
>
> The thing that confuses me at the moment is the required product mix if I
use keepalived. Right now I'm using the Corosync+Pacemaker+LVS+lidirectord
stack. If I switch to keepalived, how much does that replace, and why? From
reading the keepalived docs (which appear to be a decade old) it would seem
that keepalived wants to be a do-it-all solution, so I guess I'd have to
throw away what I know about Corosync and Pacemaker? And is HAproxy really
necessary?

Are you talking about standalone loadbalancers, or some kind of mixed setup
on the servers themselves?

For standalone loadbalancers keepalived (with VRRP for IP takeover) is all
you need, maybe augmented with conntrackd for nonloadbalanced connection
sync / failover takeup.

best regards
Patrick
_______________________________________________
Please read the documentation before posting - it's available at:
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

LinuxVirtualServer.org mailing list - lvs-users@LinuxVirtualServer.org
Send requests to lvs-users-request@LinuxVirtualServer.org
or go to http://lists.graemef.net/mailman/listinfo/lvs-users
Re: [lvs-users] Best Alternative to ldirectord [ In reply to ]
Am 07.08.2015 10:47 schrieb "Eric Robinson" <eric.robinson@psmnv.com>:
>
> The thing that confuses me at the moment is the required product mix if I
use keepalived. Right now I'm using the Corosync+Pacemaker+LVS+lidirectord
stack. If I switch to keepalived, how much does that replace, and why? From
reading the keepalived docs (which appear to be a decade old) it would seem
that keepalived wants to be a do-it-all solution, so I guess I'd have to
throw away what I know about Corosync and Pacemaker? And is HAproxy really
necessary?

Are you talking about standalone loadbalancers, or some kind of mixed setup
on the servers themselves?

For standalone loadbalancers keepalived (with VRRP for IP takeover) is all
you need, maybe augmented with conntrackd for nonloadbalanced connection
sync / failover takeup.

best regards
Patrick
_______________________________________________
Please read the documentation before posting - it's available at:
http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/

LinuxVirtualServer.org mailing list - lvs-users@LinuxVirtualServer.org
Send requests to lvs-users-request@LinuxVirtualServer.org
or go to http://lists.graemef.net/mailman/listinfo/lvs-users
Re: [lvs-users] Best Alternative to ldirectord [ In reply to ]
On 08/07/2015 10:54 AM, Patrick Schaaf wrote:
> Am 07.08.2015 10:47 schrieb "Eric Robinson" <eric.robinson@psmnv.com>:
>>
>> The thing that confuses me at the moment is the required product mix if I
> use keepalived. Right now I'm using the Corosync+Pacemaker+LVS+lidirectord
> stack. If I switch to keepalived, how much does that replace, and why?

All. keepalived brings its own "cluster" stack (compared to Pacemaker
and friends pretty dumb, but awesome fast). I have both, ldird +
Pacemaker in several verions (even an old, slightly patched 2.1.x
heartbeat that runs extremely solid but screams "don't touch!") as well
as dozens of keepalived setups -- and OpenBSD relayd setups. Depends on
the customer and what is needed.

> From
> reading the keepalived docs (which appear to be a decade old)

The basics remained. But man pages are up to date.

> it would seem
> that keepalived wants to be a do-it-all solution, so I guess I'd have to
> throw away what I know about Corosync and Pacemaker?

Not necessarily, but if you want to replace ldirectord by keepalived,
you won't need it in that place in future.

> And is HAproxy really
> necessary?

Don't think so. keepalived is extremely flexible.

> Are you talking about standalone loadbalancers, or some kind of mixed setup
> on the servers themselves?
>
> For standalone loadbalancers keepalived (with VRRP for IP takeover) is all
> you need, maybe augmented with conntrackd for nonloadbalanced connection
> sync / failover takeup.

Speaking of OpenBSD above, this is where it still seems to be ahead of
Linux. On Linux, a seemless failover is only possible now and then (due
to internal/external cache syncronization), while OpenBSD rocks in this
field. However, it may only be suitable for small/medium setups. As soon
as packets are screaming over the wire, Linux performs way better.

> best regards
> Patrick

Best,

Timo

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Please read the documentation before posting - it's available at:
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