IP Load balancing

[fspinillo]

I am currently in the process of configuring to Oracle servers to handle our new student management system. We also purchased two web servers to handle access to the database since it will be web based. I am looking to set up IP load balancing between the two web servers using a virtual IP address.

I found and read about the Piranha utility for load balancing servers. Upon reading I noticed that I need to set up a routing server to handle the load balancing, which they recommend clustering.

I am trying to find out if there is a way to load balance the severs without needing to introduce another two; similar to how you use IIS in Windows where you assign a VIP to two servers and have on server load balance.

[six_impressive]

Have a look at the profense load balancer.

It is available as a vmware virtual appliance and is very easy to use.

jamesy

[kazakx]

A cheap solution is to use a round robin dns entry for this. just name the web servers portal.bladibla.com if you are using it for an intranet.
When people try to resolve this portal they will get de ip of the first web server. The next one will get de second dns entry and so on. Don't forget to set a very short caching time. Although not all the clients will consider this cache and will use their own defaults.
Read futher: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Round_robin_DNS

[fspinillo]

I will check out the two solutions mentioned.

With the VM appliance, does it just run on the host machines?

I should have also mentioned that the web servers will be accessed from the internet.

[six_impressive]

With the profense linux load balancer there is no need to install anything on your web or db servers.

The web traffic hits the profense load balancer which then distributes the traffic amongst the servers you configure through its web browser based interface.

Also, I found it easier to get profense working when installing it from scratch rather than using the virtual appliance.

I'm using it at two sites now with great success ;)