Am looking to setup a small load-balanced cluster for client. Am on a a VERY tight budget (emphasis supplied).

Client wanted to know if they could buy the BIP-IP Load Balancers (tons of them being sold on Ebay) and utilize them.

I saw the prices - like $250/Load Balancer. Pretty cheap. Its a Pentium III - 500MHz, 128MB RAM, Less than 10GB Hard disk.

Would something like this suffice for load balancing 5 machines (for web) - daily pageviews about 45,000?

For what its worth the auction is on:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=51167&item=5731367580&rd=1

Any users of BIG-IP - please do PM me

5 machines for 45,000 pageviews? What in the world is on those pages? You should probably look into optimizing the code a bit before throwing more hardware at it.

Yes, as long as you're not doing NAT, a P3 should be fine. Keep in mind that throwing some boxes behind a load balancer does not make a cluster. You still need to handle synchronizing files, databases, and session data, so the visitors and applications see a consistent site.

I second the comment about 5 machines for 45k hits. There is no reason that should not run on 1 machine (unless you are doing some *very* cpu intensive tasks).

Keep in mind that when buying second hand you get it as is and support from f5 will probably be expensive....

F5 is a great Load Balancer. Runs Freebsd and has many diff load balancing algs.


As far as the 5 machine are they all used for web ? or do you have some dns / mail machines??

Just to add some material for clarification...

The "hit" count is probably much much higher, the page-view is 45,000 per day. I think (I am not sure so don't hold me to it yet), the number of hits we get daily is about 6.5 Million.

The reason for 5 machines is - believe it or not a stupid RFP clause that we are following. We "cannot" challange anything in the specification document handed out to us, just to follow it.

Its an important website but on a tight budget, the RFP says 5 web-servers, 5 web-servers is what they get. The back-end database server is already on a cluster and has been working.

With respect to the comment of the initial install and looking at things like synchronization, etc. we have already been providing the same to the client based on two boxes, now would simply be increasing it to 5.

I was just a bit apprehensive of the "128MB" RAM on the BIG-IP LB. Is that enough? Pardon the ignorance - do LBs need more RAM in better channelling/switching the incoming requests? or no?

The machines are "purely" web. No application server on them except plain old PHP.

Yeah, I've been there with the RFPs. Most server memory is tied up in buffers, disk cache, and application data, and your router will not have any of that. I'm not overly concerned about the memory.

well, you could always open the box and stick in more memory.. it's a PC I guess ;)

It is only a PC :) . We purchased several of these boxes as servers. A local company had the contract to build these for F5 at one point, and got stuck with surplus inventory. It's a neat case, they just spray painted over the F5 logo.

Ours came with a promise ATA raid card (the kind that could be flashed to ATA RAID).

Those auctions look like a pretty good deal.

Originally posted by apollo
well, you could always open the box and stick in more memory.. it's a PC I guess ;)

Originally posted by Babushka99
The "hit" count is probably much much higher, the page-view is 45,000 per day. I think (I am not sure so don't hold me to it yet), the number of hits we get daily is about 6.5 Million.

Should work great. I ran some major websites behind two Big-IP's (in a failover configuration) in the late 90's that handled 100's of thousands of page views (several million hits) per day, pushing around 20-30 Mbps sustained web traffic during the day hours (no streaming, no downloads). The Big-IP's handled it just fine. One site behind them alone had 10 webservers load-balanced as one site.

Your only concern is going to be the OS configuration on those is pretty much proprietary. If the OS has some problems, you'll likely be out of luck unless you pay F5 for support. As someone mentioned, as I remember it, it's a bsd based OS, but it's heavily modified.

If it gives you that much flak, just replace it with Linux Virtual Server. In fact, you could just run LVS on a couple web servers if you really need to wring some costs out of the project.

BIG-IP will handle that load without any problems.

We are using it on several locations and some of them are pumping out 50mbit/s during working hours without any problem.

We load balance DNS, HTTP, HTTPS, SMTP

Good luck!

try ultramonkey!