Need open source "Free" load balancing server

[TechBoyJK]

I'm looking for an open source, something like pfSense, or an App running on CentOS/Ubuntu, that can provide Network Load Balancing (NLB).

What I need is to have 3-5 Webservers all connected to a database server. The domain for the site that is being hosted would point to a VIP (virtual IP) on the load balancer. The LB would then redirect the requests to one of the webservers in a round robin fashion. It would require sticky sessions, in that once a visitor is directed to a particular webserver, it stays there until that server is too busy or unavailable. I'm not looking for any session sharing failover capabilities.

For instance, vistor A goes to site and the LB sends it to www1. Throughout the entire visit, visitor A stays on that server. Only if that server fails, will connections that have been assigned to it fail over to another server in the VIP pool. If that does occur, we are willing to accept that users would need to create a new session on the next server they are pushed to.

I'm looking at the LB capabilities of pfSense, but I'm curious if anybody knows of any better solutions.

 

[Jamsan]

You mentioned Ubuntu/CentOS, but that doesn't rule out that you're using Windows (or does it?). If not, you could try using the NLB built in to Windows.

 

[Crusty]

Use HAProxy. That's what we use on our production servers to proxy/load balance mongrel servers for hosting Ruby on Rails applications. It's very lightweight, configurable, and fast. Of course, it won't be able to touch a true hardware LB, but you wanted free 🙂

I should also point out that Apache has a mod_proxy module that does the same thing, but it's not as configurable IMO and it's slower.

 

[TechBoyJK]

Originally posted by: Jamsan
You mentioned Ubuntu/CentOS, but that doesn't rule out that you're using Windows (or does it?). If not, you could try using the NLB built in to Windows.

The actual webservers are windows. But I want a box out front to do the LB.

pfSense was our target because we could put a pfsense out front to act as firewall and load balancer, but one of the engineers I work for was looking through the work list and found that the pfSense dev's aren't happy with the load balancing engine that pfSense uses, and are working on putting an entirely different engine in sometime next year. Until then, they say its "sketchy".

As of right now, our firewall is an Ubuntu server install, running IPtables in bridge mode. Works fine as a FW, but no load balancing.

I'm trying to avoid having to get some F5's or ServIron boxes.

 

[drebo]

Squid uses can be configured to act as a load balancer. I believe they call it "reverse proxy". Alternatively, you can use a simple round robin DNS to direct to www1, www2, etc. A load balancing appliance would make that seemless (all connections to www.) But, if you don't care about that, DNS round robin might be the simplest alternative.