8

Based on this question: Widely-used load balancing solutions?, LVS may be the right solution for my problem.

But when I went to its homepage http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/, I found that LVS has been updated since Nov, 2008. The world's moving fast, and I don't know if LVS was obsolete or not.

Is LVS standing still, or there're some better solutions to replace it?

Thank you so much.

Community
  • 1
Vimvq1987
  • 475
  • 7
  • 18
  • It looks from the web site like a new version of the ipvsadm management tool was released Feb 2011. The actual LVS implementation is in the Linux kernel though and is currently maintained. – mtinberg Jun 24 '11 at 22:39

4 Answers4

7

I use it currently in a highly available production environment serving numerous public users. I swear by it and would encourage you to give it a try.

With that said, there are alternatives depending on your application and preference. These include:

Warner
  • 23,440
  • 2
  • 57
  • 69
  • It may be a bug that I can't vote up this answer! – Vimvq1987 Mar 31 '10 at 08:15
  • These are actually L7 proxy, not L4 director. They terminate TCP connections and LVS (or other L4 directors) don't. If you put VRRP/OSPF/ECMP on them, the TCP connections will be disturbed on a node-failure scenario. – Jiangge Zhang Dec 12 '19 at 04:49
2

As of 2016 the LVS code is still maintained in the Linux kernel tree as a subset of the netfilter code. In the kernel tree check under: ...net/netfilter/ipvs and ...Documentation/networking/ipvs-sysctl.txt

The ipvsadm tooling is stable, not obsolete and can still be downloaded from http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/software/ipvs.html

As far as I can tell IPv6 support for IPVS never made it past the experimental stage so that may be detractor.

The active development is now primarily found in keepalived that builds on LVS.

HBruijn
  • 72,524
  • 21
  • 127
  • 192
  • The current documentation seems to be located here https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/Documentation/networking/ipvs-sysctl.rst IPv6 support seems to be present in projects building upon IPVS: https://raymii.org/s/articles/Adding_IPv6_to_a_keepalived_and_haproxy_cluster.html so this probably evolved since 2016. – AdamKalisz Jul 13 '20 at 13:48
0

We use components of the LVS for high availability solutions (specifically, keepalived to float virtual IPs from server to server as required).

Rodger
  • 609
  • 4
  • 6
0

Yes - it is old. But: It is stable.

We use it in conjunction with another "old" add-on: lvs-kiss. That one seems to be pretty "dead" too.

The best about lvs is that it is fast. This is because it works on layer 2/3 - which is also its greatest drawback. It has no idea what a http-session is.

Tomcat does - you can put lvs in front of any service - if each of the servers providing that service does share its session information with the other servers you will have a pretty good combination.

The only drawback of LVS is IMHO the fixed time setting for replicating (ip-)session informatation to a slave lvs-server.

Nils
  • 7,657
  • 3
  • 31
  • 71