Load-balancing an SSL-based server farm?

[Paul Lussier]

Hi all,

Has anyone here set up LVS (or something equivalent) to load balance
across a set of apache servers serving up SSL-protected sites?

I've googled around, and all the docs I've come up with are at least 4+
years old, and somewhat incomplete.  Interestingly, I can't even find a
single book about the topic!

The examples I've found tend to be concerned with a basic apache config
without SSL being involved, and don't address the scalability of the LVS
configuration.  The things I'm most concerned with :)

The basic scope of the project is this:

 - we have about 10 apache servers handling 10,000 sites over both http
   and https (for a total of ~20K sites)
 
 - we need a scalable HA load-balancing solution to sit in front of
   these servers and load balance across them dealing with both http and
   https traffic.

My questions at this point are:

- Is LVS the right tool, or is there something better (OSS) ?
- Can LVS handle this size of a load ?
- How many sites can LVS scale to serving?
- Can the LVS config be updated dynamically, on-the-fly, without
  restarting ldirectord ?
- Is there any recent (w/in the last 2 years) documentation or are there
  any books on building such an environment with LVS ?

Many thanks for any information, URLs, pointers, references, etc.

--
Paul