Subject: Fault-tolerant hosts

From: Nicolas BONNET <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 14:35:18 +0100

I make a study on fault-tolerant systems including networking.
I have found RFCs on the subject for routers.

My question is what about the host side ?
I have to address the problem where a host has two attachments to two
LANs.
Is there a concept of virtual IP address for a host ? additional
question : any possibility to perform load balancing when the two
attachments are up ?
The general problem is to allow two hosts to communicate through a
redundant LAN in a transparent way.

Any links to RFCs or study or products is welcome.
Thanks by advance.
Nicolas BONNET

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From: Lewis Adam-CAL022 <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 07:43:21 -0600

Intel has a NIC card that does this.

http://www.intel.com/network/technologies/fault_tolerance.htm
http://www.intel.com/network/tech_brief/Server_bottlenecks.pdf
http://www.intel.com/network/technologies/load_balancing.htm

Have fun.

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Adam Lewis				Email: [email-masked]    
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From: David Whipple <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 29 Dec 1999 05:58:03 -0800

Nicolas,

In windows2000 (Advanced Server/Data Center Server), and NT4.0 Enterprise
Edition, there is a feature called WLBS (Windows Load Balancing Service)
which allows you to assign a virtual IP to several NT machines and create IP
level redundancy for applications such as Web hosting, FTP, etc.  This
functionality is not based on VRRP, however it is quite useful for creating
groups of NT servers and providing IP level redundancy among them.  

Here is a pointer to information on the subject:

http://www.microsoft.com/ntserver/ntserverenterprise/exec/feature/wlbs/

If you have any further questions, please feel free to email me.

Thanks,
David Whipple.