9.2. Keepalived and HAProxy Replace Piranha as Load Balancer

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 replaces the Piranha Load Balancer technology with Keepalived and HAProxy.

Keepalived provides simple and robust facilities for load balancing and high availability. The load-balancing framework relies on the well-known and widely used Linux Virtual Server kernel module providing Layer-4 (transport layer) load balancing. Keepalived implements a set of checkers to dynamically and adaptively maintain and manage a load balanced server pool according to their health. Keepalived also implements the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol (VRRPv2) to achieve high availability with director failover.

HAProxy is a TCP/HTTP reverse proxy which is particularly suited for high availability environments. HAProxy can:

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the Load Balancer technology is now included in the base operating system and is no longer a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Add-On.