Ultra Monkey is a project to create load balanced and highly available network services. UltraMonkey is an opensource project that uses Linux Virtual Server and Heartbeat opensource projects.

For example a cluster of web servers that appear as a single web server to end-users. The service may be for end-users across the world connected via the internet, or for enterprise users connected via an intranet.

An end-user sends a packet to the virtual service, Ultra Monkey selects a server and forwards the packet. When the server replies, Ultra Monkey forwards this reply back to the end-user. This is the very basic operation of Ultramonkey.

Ultra Monkey makes runs on Linux operating system to provide a flexible solution that can be tailored to a wide range of needs. From small clusters of only two nodes to large systems serving thousands of connections per second.

While the Ultra Monkey software itself runs on Linux, it is able to provide clustering for virtually any network services running on an operating system that can communicate using TCP or UDP. This means almost any operating system, including Windows™, Solaris™ and of course Linux itself and a wide range of protocols, with native health checks for: Web, Mail, FTP, News, LDAP and DNS. Other protocols can be suported using a non-native health check or by adding a custom health check.

UltraMonkey-L7

UltraMonkey-L7 project extends from the earlier Ultra Monkey project and provides load balancing features at Layer 7. The architecture is flexible to incorporate various protocols and load balancing methods, that can be added in the future.

Over the recent years, SSL encryption is used to prevent loss of information during communication in web applications. The architecture of UltraMonkey-L7 has been enabled to easily incorporate the processing of SSL communication.

Key Features

• Layer 7 switching using the Linux Virtual Server.
• Load-balancing using specific character string interpretation of URL
• Session persistence using specific character string interpretation of URLEasily expandable to a large number of IP based virtual services.
• High Availability provided by Heartbeat protocol.
• Supports Highly Available and Load Balanced topologies with working configuration examples. 

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Eddie is a high availability clustering tool. It is an open source, 100% software solution written primarily in the functional programming language Erlang (http://www.erlang.org/) and is available for Solaris, Linux and *BSD.

Eddie provides advanced automatic traffic management and configuration of geographically distributed server sites, consisting of one or more Local Area Networks.

At each site, certain servers are designated as Front End Servers. These servers are responsible for controlling and distributing incoming traffic across designated Back End Servers, and tracking the availability of Back End Web Servers within the site. Back End Servers may support a range of Web servers, including Apache.

Currently, Eddie consists of two main software packages:

Enhanced DNS

For server sites distributed over a city, a country, or even the world, Eddie's Enhanced DNS allows the entire distributed web server capacity to be usable. The individual sites may have different numbers of servers, different vintages of computer, even different operating systems.

The load information passed between servers at a site is processed locally and summary information passed to each Eddie Enhanced DNS server, across the Internet if necessary.

The Eddie Enhanced Domain Name Service package dynamically balances client domain name resolution requests across all sites in the distributed server, and more specifically, across each Front End within each site. The balancing is performed to keep each site working at approximately the same fraction of its overall capacity, rather than equalising the number of requests sent to each site, as occurs with Round Robin based schemes. This ensures maximum efficiency of Front End Server resources within each site.

Intelligent HTTP Gateway

Within a single site, Eddie's Intelligent HTTP Gateway supports superior functionality and performance.  Load information passed to Front End Servers running the Intelligent HTTP Gateway package enables,

• Dynamic load balancing to be employed, maximising the capacity of the site.
• Automatic discovery of failed servers and subsequent re-direction of traffic, thereby improving reliability.
• Site scalability through simple addition of extra servers as needed.
• Advanced admission controls to be employed to improve user Quality of Service.

For more information and download, please click here