I have several servers that run at different sites around my local area. The servers all have static public ip addresses, however, the link speed at each site is very limited (only about 50KBs upload.) Each server holds complete copies of all web sites. Round Robin is the only thing distributing the load. I would like to have a "smarter" system in place that can accomplish the following tasks: Distribute http requests to servers with the most available bandwidth (url redirection??) Remove servers from the balancing pool if they are unreachable No single points of failure. Can be used with name virtual hosts. Nothing special is required for the sites, just plain http on port 80. no ssl no php mysql or any of that.. just pure static web pages like the old days. I have researched this topic and found most load balancing is for available system resources, not available bandwidth. The ones I did manage to find were very outdated. Basically I want an updated version of DC-apache and cannot believe how difficult it has been. I would assume this sort of technique would be more widely used.
I'm not sure howto do this bandwidth thing, but apart from this you can find some tutorials in http://www.howtoforge.com/howtos/high-availability
I have been through those and none are what im looking for... I don't know if im using the wrong search terms or what. I mean, there has got to be a way to load balance geologically distributed web servers based on bandwidth load... All the HA stuff seems to be take over and front end balancers to back end server at the same site, however, I need a solution that does this with servers across the net. The proxy approach doesnt do me any good... What about url redirection.. on the initial web request, the client is fowarded to whatever host has the most bandwidth (or if that is too much to ask, number of active connections instead of bandwidth.) There has got to be something out there for this.. I mean, so many web sites have more than one A record for their wwws that are different subnets and different datacenters. How do they balance between all of their datacenter sites?
Ok, scrap that I guess... Ok, new question. Are there any balancing solutions for distributed servers??
I mean, whats the best way to load balance www servers that have diff ips and in different locations...
Try one of these tutorials: http://www.howtoforge.com/high-availability-load-balancer-haproxy-heartbeat-debian-etch http://www.howtoforge.com/high-availability-load-balancer-pound-keepalived-debian-etch http://www.howtoforge.com/haproxy_loadbalancer_debian_etch
