Balance is our (still) suprisingly successful load balancing solution being
a simple but powerful generic tcp proxy with round robin load balancing and failover mechanisms. Its
behaviour can be controlled at runtime using
a simple command line syntax.
Balance supports IPv6 on the listening side which makes it a very useful tool for IPv6 migration
of IPv4 only services and servers.
Balance successfully runs at least on Linux(386), Linux(Itanium),
FreeBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, Cygwin, Mac-OS X, HP-UX and many more.
Balance is Open Source Software and released under GPL licensing terms.
BalanceNG® is our commercial Software Load Balancer for Linux and Solaris which is available
under a "Free Basic Trial License".
Click here for more information.
# balance smtp host1.test.net host2.test.net
Connections to the local SMTP port will be forwarded alterating to
the SMTP port on host1 and host2. Balance runs automatically in background.
# balance -b 2001:DB8::1 80 10.1.1.1 10.1.1.2
Balance
binds on port 80 of the local IPv6 IP address 2001:DB8::1 and distributes connections
to the IPv4 addresses 10.1.1.1 and 10.1.1.2.
# balance -b ::ffff:10.1.1.3 80 10.1.1.1 10.1.1.2
Balance
binds on port 80 of the local IPv4 IP address 10.1.1.3 (provided in IPv6 notation) and distributes connections
to the IPv4 addresses 10.1.1.1 and 10.1.1.2.
# balance -fp imap mailserver
Connections to the local IMAP port will always be forwarded to the
host "mailserver". Balance
stays in foreground and all data is printed in readable format on
stdout.
$ balance -f 8888 host1 10.1.1.1:8000
Connections to the local port 8888 are forwarded alternating to host1, port
8888 and the host 10.1.1.1, port 8000. Balance
stays in foreground connected to the "controlling tty".
