Introduction to Ultra Monkey

Overview

Cluster Network Services
Ultra Monkey is a project to create load balanced and highly available network services. For example a cluster of web servers that appear as a single web server to end-users. The service may be for end-users across the world connected via the internet, or for enterprise users connected via an intranet.

Diagram: Sample Ultra Network

1. An end-user sends a packet to the virtual service
2. Ultra Monkey selects a server and forwards the packet
3. The server replies
4. Ultra Monkey forwards this reply back to the end-user

Flexible
Ultra Monkey makes use of the Linux operating system to provide a flexible solution that can be tailored to a wide range of needs. From small clusters of only two nodes to large systems serving thousands of connections per second.

Open Source Working with Your Network

Use Any Operating System
While the Ultra Monkey software itself runs on Linux, it is able to provide clustering for virtually any network services running on an operating system that can communicate using TCP or UDP. This means almost any operating system, including Windows™, Solaris™ and of course Linux itself.

Supports a Wide Range of Protocols
Ultra Monkey supports a wide range of protocols, with native health checks for: Web, Mail, FTP, News, LDAP and DNS. Other protocols can be suported using a non-native health check or by adding a custom health check.

Open Source
Ultra Monkey is open source. It makes use of software from various open source projects including The Linux Virtual Server and Heartbeat. Members of the Ultra Monkey project actively contribute to the open source projects whose software is used. Horms, the Ultra Monkey project lead, is one of the core members of the development teams for both Heartbeat and The Linux Virtual Server.

Easy to Install and Maintain

Download, Install, Configure, Project Complete!

Supported Distribitions
Ultra Monkey provides binary packages for a selected list of distributions. Source packages are also available. At this time the following distributions are supported:

• Debian Woody (Stable 3.0)
• Debian Sid (Unstable/Testing)
• Fedora Core 1
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0
• Red Hat 9
• Red Hat 8.0
• Red Hat 7.3

Updates
The Ultra Monkey team tracks software packages and releases updates for security or other critical bugs. This includes the kernel as Ultra Monkey provides a kernel patched with The Linux Virtual Server and other related patches. Announcements of these updates packages are available in the News Archive.

Documentation
Ultra Monkey also provides concise documentation in English and Japanese to allow system administrators to easily install and configure an Ultra Monkey cluster. The documentation is available online at www.ultramonkey.org and ultramonkey.jp. Ultra Monkey does not however place restrictions on the way that the underlying software and Linux itself is used, allowing users to customise the system to their needs.

Key Features

• Fast Load Balancing using The Linux Virtual Server
• Flexible High Availability provided by the Linux-HA framework
• Service level monitoring using ldirectord ldirectord
• Supports Highly Available and/or Load Balanced topologies with worked configuration examples
• Easily expandable to a large number of IP based virtual services using fwmarks
• Pre-built packages for Debian Sarge [offsite] and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 [offsite].
• All Code is Open Source

Download

The current release is Ultra Monkey 3 which has been built and tested on Debian Sarge and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0. It includes comprehensive documentation on the software included, the technologies used and how to configure a highly available and/or load balanced network. more....

The previous release, 2.0.1, is also available, though new deployments are incouraged to use Ultra Monkey 3. more....

Miscellaneous

The history lists all releases of Ultra Monkey.

More Information

For more information please see the Ultra Monkey web site.

• English: ultramonkey.org
• Japanese: ultramonkey.jp

Thanks : ultramonkey.org/