LBVM - Sharing virtual machines among physical servers

LBVM allows sharing virtual machines among physical servers in a predefined cluster. It is fully configurable and requires only a few setup steps before running automatically. LBM, LB LOG and LB MONITOR (as seen in figure) are the core scripts and perform the necessary steps.

The LBM script is the management interface to the load balancer and is used to view all balanced virtual machines, review log files and reports, manually migrate virtual machines from one server to another and to add an existing virtual machine to the cluster.

LB LOG is a small cronjob which runs regularly on each server to monitor predefined resources. The resource logs are stored on a shared storage and are evaluated by the load balancer.

The load balancer LB MONITOR runs as a clustered service, uses different algorithms to decide which virtual machines should be moved or reported and finally starts the live migration process.

The current release of the LBVM includes configuration files and scripts for the virtualization technologies OpenVZ and Xen to support live migrations with zero-downtime.