Linux Virtual Server for Scalable Network Services

This paper describes the motivation, design, internal implementation of Linux Virtual Server. The goal of Linux Virtual Server is to provide a basic framework to build highly scalable and highly available network services using a large cluster of commodity servers. The TCP/IP stack of Linux kernel is extended to support three IP load balancing techniques, which can make parallel services of different kinds of server clusters to appear as a service on a single IP address. Scalability is achieved by transparently adding or removing a node in the cluster, and high availability is provided by detecting node or daemon failures and reconfiguring the system appropriately.