[Gllug] Solaris IP Multipath Routing facility in Linux

[tet at accucard.com]

>	We have a number of Solaris boxen sat at the front of a network,
>dually loadbalancing and cute stuff like that, using the Solaris
>IP Network Multipathing facility.

More important than load balancing (at least from our perspective) is
the fact that multipathing gives you network resilience. If you have
a big enough feed to the Internet that you're even close to saturating
your network bandwidth, then I envy you :-) We use multipathing to
ensure that our web servers stay available even if a network card
dies, or if a network cable get pulled/cut/otherwise made inactive.

The only problem, at least with the current Solaris implementation,
is that it needs 4 IP addresses per machine -- two for data, and
two for heartbeat. What's worse is that these all have to be on a
single subnet. Ideally, we'd be able to put the heartbeat addresses
onto a separate network, but no such luck. With a web server that's
doing IP based virtual hosting, that gets a bit messy. ifconfig -a
gives us far more interfaces than any one machine has a right to
have :-)

Tet

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