Linux load balancing & high availability clusters

How complex is this stuff?
We currently have four Windows 2000 Enterprise Edition clusters supporting various different virtual file sharing servers, and a web cluster or two.
Now that I have VMware ESX up & running and I'm vitalising everything and anything I'm playing a bit with some Linux VMs and wondering about moving away from Windows to Linux.

Am I crazy ?

All the Big Boys (and Girls) are doing it, so it can't be that hard to set up.

Google is your friend.

http://www.informit.com/articles/article.asp?p=380913&rl=1

Also look at a presentation on ddraid done by Daniel Phillips of Red Hat. He's basically written a clustered RAID server that copes with (up to) entire box failure. There are also a couple of distributed load-balancing file systems, like Lustre, which can do similar things.

But that may be only one aspect out of what you're wanting out of your cluster. What are your requirements? What software packages are you needing to run? What sort of network do you have in place?

Have fun,

Paul

P.S. This was one of the cool things about being at the 2005 linux.conf.au.

Had a good think about this and figured I'd just be cursing mysefl with more work.
I still might do it on the side to learn some stuff.

depends on what you consider complicated.

Setting up linux clusters is easy.. What you sound like you need is Linux LVS for load balancing and failover.. a lot of big site use it..

Personaly, I do high preformance clusters, which have different requirements..