Re:PC's are not for networking (Score 1)

I would argue that LVS is a fine alternative to costly hardware based load balancers. I have tried both hardware based load balancers from Cisco and used LVS. Using LVS I have provided sites with 5 9's worth of uptime. With keepalived and two load balancers you achieve a very robust and flexible system. My 2c worth? If you are requiring load balancing, cater to your strengths. If you have a lot of experience running Linux and want something that costs just the simple hardware, use LVS. If you know Cisco inside out and already have an investment in Cisco gear use Cisco (or F5, Nortel, etc). I have seen people follow the 'hardware is so much better' approach and gone with solutions they were not skilled with, did not keep up to date with, and were uncomfortable using to their full extent. That leads to user error, lag time in patching security holes, and all sorts of nasties. To finish with my own 'back in the days' anecdote, we initally *did* purchase a dedicated load balancer. It was a Cisco Local Director and was very poorly suited to the task of load balancing. The Cisco cost $10,000 and we replaced it with 2 P3-666's running LVS and heartbeat, for a cost of just over $2000. The LVS solution was *far* superior at the time to the Local Director and much more flexible, and went on to achive close to 500 days of uptime on both directors. At which time the power went out, generators kicked in, UPS fuse blew and all redundancy was for naught in that data centre.