LOAD BALANCING AND FAILOVER OF NETWORK SERVICES

摘要

A system and method for many-to-many failover and load balancing establishes a plurality of service groups for providing desired computing services. Each service group comprises a plurality of hosts, and each host within the service group is available to perform the computing services for which that group as a whole is responsible. Each host may belong to a plurality of service groups. Each operational host within a service group transmits periodic messages to each other host within the service group advising of the status of the transmitting host. A leader host evaluates the periodic messages and, where appropriate, dynamicall reassigns responsibility for particular computing services to a host within the group. The reassignment can be due either to failover or load balancing.