Robust fault tolerant PC-based server load balancer: EAGLE

• Main Authors: Ayson, John Paolo D., Mendoza, Christopher U., Pangilinan, Mark Edward M., Viesca, Adrian Joseph L.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2010
• Subjects: Database management; Client/server computing; Operating systems (Computers)
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/14652
• Institution: De La Salle University

High availability is very important in e-business. A network failure causes a massive loss of income and degrading of reputation to consumers. Network failure due to the server crashing is caused by massive server request or other technical malfunction. To avoid such problem, server load balancers are used as a solution. A server load balancer distributes tasks to a server farm which consists of many physical servers to overcome massive overloading due to enormous server request. There are two types of server load balancers, appliance-based and PC-based balancers. The appliance-based load balancers are made exclusively for load balancing tasks. PC-based balancers, on the other hand, are programs running in a personal computer. Since it is PC-based, it contains components, such as hard drives, that are more prone to errors. This makes PC-based load balancers a single point of failure. The Linux Virtual Server which is a PC-based load balancer, addresses this issue by supporting the use of two load balancers wherein one is standby, which takes over the load balancing tasks once the active load balancer fails. However, a limitation to this fault tolerant approach is that established connections are not retained when the state of the load balancer changes, thus client request should be resent again. This study aims to develop a robust fault tolerant PC-based server load balancer that can maintain established connections when the active load balancer fails. Experiments shows that the system can still maintain established connection even when the active load balancer fails.