Not sure if this is possible ( as I haven't tried it) but what about
building nginx on Damn Small Linux and having a boot cd or ramdisk, or
even boot flash. You could literally take something like a PowerEdge
1425 or so and have a kicking minimalistic LB hardware running on nginx.

Technically if you were so inclined, you could even write DSL and nginx
to a prom chip so its 100% automated, I'm better if nginx does everything
you need it would be a lot cheaper than the hardware normal route with the
same if not better stability.


Personally what I would do is (assuming you have ESX), run 2 VM's both
running nginx on dedicated NICs. Then one your switching set up an
active/active fail over to those nice ( and have the VM's on separate ESX
hosts).
You would then have a fully redundant LB system so if nginx on one node
crashes the fail over would route all traffic to the other LB.

This might require a little coding to nginx, to cause on OPPS on errors ,
so that the node would reboot.

Just my thoughts.
David
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nginx@sysoev.ru [mailto:owner-nginx@sysoev.ru] On Behalf Of John
Moore
Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 9:41 AM
To: nginx@sysoev.ru
Subject: Viability of nginx instead of hardware load balancer?

I'm working on a project where it's critical to minimize the possibility of
a single point of failure, and where there will be quite high traffic.
Currently in another version of the system we're using nginx as a remote
proxy server for Tomcat, but the current plan is to use a hardware load
balancer in front of a Tomcat cluster (or a cluster of
nginx+Tomcat instances). I'm wondering, though, given the extraordinary
performance and reliability of nginx, whether we might be able to omit the
hardware load-balancer and use instead a couple of dedicated minimal nginx
servers with failover between them. If anyone has gone down this path and
has some good ideas and/or useful experience, I'd be keen to hear from them.