Heartbeat
Coupled with load balancing and clustered hosting, we can provide you with highly available, redundant, extremely scalable hosting solutions. For web servers, database applications, or a variety of other services.
While Heartbeat is used with LVS, it can be used on it's own. Visit the Linux-HA.org Heartbeat user list for a more in-depth look at the companies and organizations that are using Heartbeat.
Heartbeat uses serial, UDP, and PPP/UDP "heartbeats" to have a backup server ready to take over the IP addresses of the primary server in case of failure.
Heartbeating can extend to beyond the load balancer. The latest version supports, web servers (http), LVS director servers (load balancers), mail servers, database servers, firewalls, file servers, DNS servers, DHCP servers, and proxy cache servers.
How We Use Heartbeat
At base2co we take advantage of Heartbeat on our high availability server clusters. The load balancer for the cluster is a single point of failure. To avoid that, a second load balancer sit next to it, using serial and ethernet heartbeats to monitor the active one. If the active load balancer fails, the second load balancer will take over in seconds to continue servicing requests from end-users.
