On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 04:05:47PM +0000, Shervey, William E wrote: > Just reading some of your work online that discusses replacing load balancers > with haproxy. > > It looks like a great solution. http://haproxy.1wt.eu/ > > Unfortunately I am simply not smart enough to weed through the architecture > details to decide whether the tool will work in my environment. > > Perhaps you can provide some insight for me. > > My servers are VM's and they run Windows Server 2008 R2. > > I am currently using load balancers and they sometimes introduce latency that > causes primary servers to failover to secondary servers.
That sounds quite strange. Even the worst load balancer in the world should not induce as much latency as a properly tuned VM, so if your workload is highly sensitive to latency, well, remove the VMs first... Or maybe your load balancer has a bug that is fixed in a more recent version ? > I'm wondering if haproxy or one of the other suggestions in the "Other > Solutions" section would work for me? It really depends on what causes the issues you're facing with your LB. If your LB has a bug, it's possible that replacing it will help. If it's just because it runs in a VM and the hypervisor is inducing huge latencies or dropping packets, it won't help. You can try to set up haproxy on a dedicated box to run some tests if you want, it's easy enough and will cost you only a few amount of time. If you're not experienced with Linux to set up a test machine, feel free to go to http://www.exceliance.fr/en/ and request an evalation version of the ALOHA. It's much easier to set up. The eval version will be limited to a few connections per second but that will very likely be sufficient to test the latency effects you're observing. Best regards, Willy
