Red Hat ENTERPRISE LINUX AS 2.1 Installation Manual page 102

102 Chapter 6:Linux Virtual Server Overview
Figure 6–1 A Basic LVS Configuration
Service requests arriving at the LVS cluster are addressed to a virtual IP address or VIP. This is a
publicly-advertised address the administrator of the site associates with a fully-qualified domain name,
1
such as www.example.com, and which is assigned to one or more virtual server . Figure 6–1, A Basic
LVS Configuration shows only one virtual IP address, but there may be more than one. The important
thing to remember is that a VIP address will migrate from one LVS router to the other during a failover,
thus maintaining a presence at that IP address. As such, they can be considered floating IP addresses.
VIP addresses may be aliased to the same device which connects the LVS router to the Internet. For
instance, if eth0 is connected to the Internet, than multiple virtual servers can be aliased to eth0:1.
1 A virtual server is a service configured to listen on a specific virtual IP. See Section 9.6, VIRTUAL SERVERS
for more on configuring a virtual server using the Piranha Configuration Tool.