XDP

My load balancing software vc5 has recently aquired support for IPv6 and layer 3 DSR backend servers. As well as bringing a 21st century internetworking protocol to the table this means that the restriction of having to keep all backend servers on VLANs which are directly attached to the load balancer has been removed. To prevent the routing loop that would occur if the original ingress packets were fed back into the router, the incoming packets need to be encapsualated with a tunneling protocol. [Read More]

As a happy conclusion to the previous post, it seems that updating the version of Ubuntu to 24.04 resolved the outstanding issues. When the hardware was initially commissioned 22.04 was the current LTS version, and I’m a little wary of using an LTS version which is only a month or two out of the gate, so I didn’t immediately switch. As it became clear that were still some serious issues with the X710 cards which we were unable to fully mitigate then rebuilding the servers with Noble Numbat seemed like the only sensible choice. [Read More]

Recently we committed to using the vc5 load balancer (what I wrote) as part of the refresh of our edge infrastructure at work. We have been using it for some time for small, lower priority services, deployed on virtual machines rather than hardware. It speaks BGP to advertise healthy services to the network routers and works well, but VMs won’t scale to the demands of our main public facing services. [Read More]