The major work of the LVS project is now to develop advanced IP load balancing software, application-level load balancing software, and cluster management components.
KTCPVS: implements application-level load balancing inside the Linux kernel, as of 2011 still under development.
LVS can be used for building highly scalable and highly available network services, such as web, email, media and VoIP services, and integrating scalable network services into large-scale reliable e-commerce or e-government applications. LVS-based solutions already have been deployed in many real applications throughout the world, including Wikipedia. The LVS components depend upon the Linux Netfilter framework, and its source code is available in the net/netfilter/ipvs subdirectory within the Linux kernel source. LVS is able to handle UDP, TCP layer-4 protocols as well as FTP passive connection by inspecting layer-7 packets. It provides a hierarchy of counters in the /proc directory. The userlandutility program used to configure LVS is called ipvsadm, which requires superuser privileges to run.
Schedulers
LVS implements several balancing schedulers, listed below with the relevant source files:
LVS director: load balancer that receives all incoming client requests for services and directs them to a specific "real server" to handle the request
Real servers: nodes that make up an LVS cluster which are used to provide services on the behalf of the cluster
Client computers: computers requesting services from the virtual server
VIP : the IP address used by the director to provide services to client computers
RIP : the IP address used to connect to the cluster nodes
DIP : the IP address used by the director to connect to network of real IP addresses
CIP : the IP address assigned to a client computer, that it uses as the source IP address for requests being sent to the cluster
Examples
Setting up a virtual HTTP server with two real servers: ipvsadm -A -t 192.168.0.1:80 -s rr ipvsadm -a -t 192.168.0.1:80 -r 172.16.0.1:80 -m ipvsadm -a -t 192.168.0.1:80 -r 172.16.0.2:80 -m
The first command assigns TCP port 80 on IP address 192.168.0.1 to the virtual server. The chosen scheduling algorithm for load balancing is round-robin. The second and third commands are adding IP addresses of real servers to the LVS setup. The forwarded network packets shall be masked. Querying the status of the above configured LVS setup:
ipvsadm -L -n
IP Virtual Server version 1.0.8 Prot LocalAddress:Port Scheduler Flags -> RemoteAddress:Port Forward Weight ActiveConn InActConn TCP 192.168.0.1:80 rr -> 172.16.0.2:80 Masq 1 3 1 -> 172.16.0.1:80 Masq 1 4 0
