“ARIES (Advanced Research on Internet E-Servers) is a project
that started at Ericsson Research Canada in January 2000. It aimed
at finding and prototyping the necessary technology to prove the
feasibility of a clustered internet server that demonstrates
telecom-grade characteristics using Linux and open-source software
as the base technology. These characteristics feature guaranteed
continuous availability, guaranteed response time, high scalability
and high performance.”
“Traffic distribution was one of the main research topics
because we needed a software-based solution that was very reliable,
high performance and yet very scalable to distribute web traffic
among multiple CPUs within the cluster. The first activity we
conducted was to survey the Open Source community and see what
solutions were already implemented, try them out on our
experimental Linux cluster and see which solution best met our
requirements (or part of them).”
“This article covers our experience with the Linux Virtual
Server (LVS), a software package that provides traffic distribution
on top of Linux. We will explain the architecture, operation and
algorithms of LVS and describe our test system and benchmarking
environment as well as the experiments we conducted to test LVS’s
robustness and scalability.”