On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 11:03 -0600, Michael Loftis wrote: > On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 5:15 PM, Welch, Bryan <bryan.we...@arrisi.com> wrote: > > Greetings all. > > > > I've been tasked with comparing the use of open source load balancing > > software against commercially available off the shelf hardware such as F5, > > which is what we currently use. We use the load balancers for traditional > > load balancing, full proxy for http/ssl traffic, ssl termination and > > certificate management, ssl and http header manipulation, nat, high > > availability of the physical hardware and stateful failover of the tcp > > sessions. These units will be placed at the customer prem supporting our > > applications and services and we'll need to support them accordingly. > > > > Now my "knee jerk" reaction to this is that it's a really bad idea. It is > > the heart and soul of our data center network after all. However, once I > > started to think about it I realized that I hadn't had any real experience > > with this solution beyond tinkering with it at home and reading about it in > > years past. > > > > Can anyone offer any operational insight and real world experiences with > > these solutions? > > Honestly I think to get *all* those features you're much better off > with commercial solutions like the ones you're already using from F5, > or something from Cisco, Coyote Point, Brocade, or others. You can > absolutely put together a solution based on any number of open source > products, but you won't get the single integrated front end for > management and configuration that any of the commercial options will > provide, you may be missing features, and ultimately, you're on the > hook for making it work. In particular the stateful failover has been > problematic in open source solutions in my experience. They've come a > VERY long way, but it is a hard problem to tackle.
+1. I think the list of features covers more than just one FOSS project. Whilst I've had no end of good experiences using LVS (as some others have mentioned), I wouldn't expect it to do all that is requested in the original post. At least, not by itself. > I've worked with open source and commercial solutions, and while the > open source systems were almost always far more flexible, and cheaper > up front, they certainly required more work to get going.. Once setup > and running though both types of solutions had pretty equal amounts of > maintenance, with the commercial solutions requiring somewhat less > time/babysitting for upgrades and to enable or use new features or > functionality. I worry far more about upgrades to proprietary appliances (where it's often the whole system image), than I do about a few package updates on a Linux machine (followed by a service restart, or two). But still, pretty well worded. :) Tom
