[Wylug-help] The recent Xen talk - a question...

[Shaun Laughey]

On Thu, 2007-09-20 at 20:11 +0100, Chris Myers wrote:
> Hi Guys,
> 
> Something that was mentioned in the recent Xen talk.
> 
> He mentioned that he had a number of Xen servers using the same IP 
> address & that Windows machine were not capable of this. Assuming that
> I 
> heard correctly, I have a few questions:
> 
> 
> 1. This doesn't appear to be possible. How is this achieved?
> 
> 2. There must be a benefit. What advantage is there for having
> multiple 
> machines on one IP address?
> 
> 3. Why can't Windows do this?

If you can stomach the advertising and gibberish on technet here's
Bill's version (fave bit: "Internet technology has been widely embraced,
serving as the foundation for delivering enterprise-wide and frequently
mission-critical applications such as Web, streaming media, and VPN
servers.")

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Bb742455.aspx

I've clustered lots of IIS servers and had fail-over SQL servers all
running from Samba 3 PDC's in the olden days when I had to touch Bill's
stuff.

However the limitations feel completely arbitrary and you get the
feeling it's just a thing they put in because the marketing dept. asked
for it.

It works by ARP so they have to be on the same subnet. There are issues
with WINS, name resolution and spurious errors in the event log.

It's just a whole lot easier to get a hardware load-balancer or use a
Linux machine to do the load balancing.

Shaun Laughey.