Multicast-based Distributed LVS (MD-LVS) for improving scalability and availability

Clustering with a single-system image view is the most commonly used approach to increase throughput of a Web site. There are two types of clustering architecture: centralized IP cluster and distributed IP cluster. In the centralized IP cluster the load balancer distributes incoming requests of clients to an appropriate real server based on load characteristics. However the availability and scalability of the cluster system is low, since this kind of solution creates a single-point-of-failure and the total throughput of the cluster is limited by the performance of the load balancer. We propose the Multicast-based Distributed LVS (MD-LVS), which combines the centralized IP cluster and the distributed IP cluster. There are multiple load balancers, and each of the load balancers has an individual and independent cluster group, which consists of several real servers. This mechanism efficiently can improve scalability and availability of the cluster system, since it is easy to expand the cluster system and may avoid the entire system failure