Set Up A High-Availability Load Balancer With Perlbal/Heartbeat On Debian Etch

Posted by falko on Jan 13, 2009 6:07 PM EDT
HowtoForge; By Falko Timme
Mail this story
Print this story

This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with Perlbal and heartbeat on Debian Etch. The load balancer sits between the user and two (or more) backend Apache web servers that hold the same content. Not only does the load balancer distribute the requests to the two backend Apache servers, it also checks the health of the backend servers. If one of them is down, all requests will automatically be redirected to the remaining backend server. In addition to that, the two load balancer nodes monitor each other using heartbeat, and if the master fails, the slave becomes the master, which means the users will not notice any disruption of the service. Perlbal is session-aware, which means you can use it with any web application that makes use of sessions (such as forums, shopping carts, etc.).

This article explains how to set up a two-node load balancer in an active/passive configuration with Perlbal and heartbeat on Debian Etch. The load balancer sits between the user and two (or more) backend Apache web servers that hold the same content. Not only does the load balancer distribute the requests to the two backend Apache servers, it also checks the health of the backend servers. If one of them is down, all requests will automatically be redirected to the remaining backend server. In addition to that, the two load balancer nodes monitor each other using heartbeat, and if the master fails, the slave becomes the master, which means the users will not notice any disruption of the service. Perlbal is session-aware, which means you can use it with any web application that makes use of sessions (such as forums, shopping carts, etc.).

http://www.howtoforge.com/setting-up-a-high-availability-load-balancer-with-perlbal-heartbeat-on-debian-etch

Full Story

  Nav
» Read more about: Story Type: Tutorial; Groups: Debian

« Return to the newswire homepage

This topic does not have any threads posted yet!

You cannot post until you login.