

Ask HN: please share your favourite firewall/loadbalancer failover setups - cullenking

I am looking at expanding our deployment infrastructure for high availability (pivoting into the B2B market, negotiating a second contract with an SLA), and will need to make a hardware purchases soon.  I am trying to find sources of good information regarding the various failover configurations possible, and their pros/cons.  Looks like running two *BSD machines for the firewall/loadbalancer, with failover provided by CARP, is a pretty simple solution.  The Linux side of things looks a little more neglected.  Are there any decent linux firewall/loadbalancer failover solutions?<p>A redundant, scalable back end is a topic that has been documented extensively, and there is no lack of information or options when it comes to scaling, in this case, a Rails application.  However, I am failing to find good information on best practices for redundant front end load balancing.  An example question I have: since we are on a budget, is it "acceptable" to dual-purpose the redundant hardware on the front end?  Being able to run our cluster of background workers on the firewall/loadbalancer failover would obviously save resources, though I am not sure if it's a good practice.<p>If anyone has experience in this category, please speak up!  Anyone with relevant links, I would love to see them.
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cullenking
After googling around throughout the day, and bugging caseyf of ravelry, I
came across some decent info.

Looks like using keepalived between two physical machines that are identically
configured as a load balancer/proxy is the way to go on linux. A brief outline
can be found here: [http://www.hackadmin.com/2010/02/22/ip-failover-for-web-
clus...](http://www.hackadmin.com/2010/02/22/ip-failover-for-web-cluster/)

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dh
Amazing company for load balancer based on open source stuff, but with
enterprise support. Can run on dedicated hardware or VMWare.

<http://www.loadbalancer.org>

