LVS Documentation

This is a collection of LVS documents, some of them are in progress, some are in Chinese.

1. Overview documents

The article "Linux Virtual Server Clusters: Build highly-scalable and highly-available network services at low cost" written by Wensong Zhang and Wenzhuo Zhang appeared in the November 2003 issue of Linux Magazine.

The presentation of "Linux Virtual Server: Linux Server Clusters for Scalable Network Services" (ppt, 534K) was given at Free Software Symposium 2002, Tokyo, Japan.

The paper "Linux Virtual Server for Scalable Network Services" (gzipped postscript, 96K) (pdf, 235K) was published at Ottawa Linux Symposium 2000. Here are the slide (Applixware slide file, 634K) and the small slide (PDF, 510K).

Load Balancing The UK National JANET Web Cache Service Using Linux Virtual Servers (local copy) by Michael Sparks at UK National Janet Web Cache Service, November, 1999.

Lars Marowsky-Bree gave a talk about Linux Virtual Servers on Linux Kongress'99. Here is his presentation (MagicPoint, 418K).

Joseph Mack gave a good talk about Linux Virtual Server at LinuxExpo'99 on May 20, 1999. The html is available on Joe's LVS page. Thanks Joe!

The paper "Creating Linux Virtual Servers" (gzipped postscript, 79K) (html) have been accepted for publication in the LinuxExpo 1999 Conference.

2. Manuals and internal documents

The following will be your primary resource for running Linux Virtual Server:

The Linux Virtual Server mailing list archives are available here, where maybe you can find some useful information to solve your problem.

3. Performance

Internet Appliance, Inc. build a web cluster product based on LVS and Coda. eTesting Labs did performance testing on their product, the testing report (local copy) is also available. (May 2001)

Patrick O'Rourke and Mike Keefe at Mission Critical Linux evaluated the performance of LVS, the report in compressed postscipt is available here. Comments from Ratz. (April 2001)

Joseph Mack's LVS Performance article, "Initial Tests with a single Realserver LVS" is available on Joe's LVS page.

4. Books

IBM has published a Redbook called "IBM eServer BladeCenter, Linux, and Open Source: Blueprint for e-business on demand". It includes load balanced services using Linux Virtual Server (LVS) and failover with Linux Heartbeat.

Karl Kopper published a book entitled "The Linux Enterprise Cluster: Build a Highly Available Cluster with Commodity Hardware and Free Software" in May 2005. The book has several chapters about LVS.

5. Misc

The LVS survey page shows the scale, software, service of some LVS clusters participating in the survey.

The LVS deployment page shows that some sites we know are using LVS to build scalable network services.

Joseph Mack wrote the "1st LVS Trivia Quiz" to coincide with the Ottawa Linux Symposium 19-22 Jul 2000. It's available on Joe's LVS page.

The LVS announcement was posted to the media on November 12, 1999.

Joe also made a nice LVS graphics for T-shirts and buttons in pdf format. It's available on Joe's LVS page.

Pictures and write ups of conferences and meetings where LVS people have attended and/or given presentations are on Joe's LVS page.

6. Old documents

Robert Thomas provided the Greased Turkey document about how to setup a load-sharing server. Thank Rob! This document covers the basics of what virtual server is, how it works, and how to set it up, which are explained in details via his virtual proxy server. It is to expand to cover a decent man (8) page, and a FAQ. By the way, the virtual server can be used for ftp service.