IPVSADM(8) Linux Administrator's Guide IPVSADM(8)NAMEipvsadm - Linux Virtual Server administration
SYNOPSISipvsadm -A|E -t|u|f service-address [-s scheduler]
[-p [timeout]] [-M netmask]
ipvsadm-D -t|u|f service-address
ipvsadm-C
ipvsadm-R
ipvsadm-S [-n]
ipvsadm -a|e -t|u|f service-address -r server-address
[-g|i|m] [-w weight] [-x upper] [-y lower]
ipvsadm-d -t|u|f service-address -r server-address
ipvsadm -L|l [options]
ipvsadm-Z [-t|u|f service-address]
ipvsadm--set tcp tcpfin udp
ipvsadm--start-daemon state [--mcast-interface interface]
[--syncid syncid]
ipvsadm--stop-daemon state
ipvsadm-h
DESCRIPTIONIpvsadm(8) is used to set up, maintain or inspect the virtual server
table in the Linux kernel. The Linux Virtual Server can be used to
build scalable network services based on a cluster of two or more
nodes. The active node of the cluster redirects service requests to a
collection of server hosts that will actually perform the services.
Supported features include two protocols (TCP and UDP), three packet-
forwarding methods (NAT, tunneling, and direct routing), and eight load
balancing algorithms (round robin, weighted round robin, least-connec‐
tion, weighted least-connection, locality-based least-connection,
locality-based least-connection with replication, destination-hashing,
and source-hashing).
The command has two basic formats for execution:
ipvsadm COMMAND [protocol] service-address
[scheduling-method] [persistence options]
ipvsadm command [protocol] service-address
server-address [packet-forwarding-method]
[weight options]
The first format manipulates a virtual service and the algorithm for
assigning service requests to real servers. Optionally, a persistent
timeout and network mask for the granularity of a persistent service
may be specified. The second format manipulates a real server that is
associated with an existing virtual service. When specifying a real
server, the packet-forwarding method and the weight of the real server,
relative to other real servers for the virtual service, may be speci‐
fied, otherwise defaults will be used.
COMMANDS
ipvsadm(8) recognises the commands described below. Upper-case commands
maintain virtual services. Lower-case commands maintain real servers
that are associated with a virtual service.
-A, --add-service
Add a virtual service. A service address is uniquely defined by
a triplet: IP address, port number, and protocol. Alternatively,
a virtual service may be defined by a firewall-mark.
-E, --edit-service
Edit a virtual service.
-D, --delete-service
Delete a virtual service, along with any associated real
servers.
-C, --clear
Clear the virtual server table.
-R, --restore
Restore Linux Virtual Server rules from stdin. Each line read
from stdin will be treated as the command line options to a sep‐
arate invocation of ipvsadm. Lines read from stdin can option‐
ally begin with "ipvsadm". This option is useful to avoid exe‐
cuting a large number or ipvsadm commands when constructing an
extensive routing table.
-S, --save
Dump the Linux Virtual Server rules to stdout in a format that
can be read by -R|--restore.
-a, --add-server
Add a real server to a virtual service.
-e, --edit-server
Edit a real server in a virtual service.
-d, --delete-server
Remove a real server from a virtual service.
-L, -l, --list
List the virtual server table if no argument is specified. If a
service-address is selected, list this service only. If the -c
option is selected, then display the connection table. The exact
output is affected by the other arguments given.
-Z, --zero
Zero the packet, byte and rate counters in a service or all ser‐
vices.
--set tcp tcpfin udp
Change the timeout values used for IPVS connections. This com‐
mand always takes 3 parameters, representing the timeout
values (in seconds) for TCP sessions, TCP sessions after receiv‐
ing a FIN packet, and UDP packets, respectively. A timeout
value 0 means that the current timeout value of the correspond‐
ing entry is preserved.
--start-daemon state
Start the connection synchronization daemon. The state is to
indicate that the daemon is started as master or backup. The
connection synchronization daemon is implemented inside the
Linux kernel. The master daemon running at the primary load bal‐
ancer multicasts changes of connections periodically, and the
backup daemon running at the backup load balancers receives mul‐
ticast message and creates corresponding connections. Then, in
case the primary load balancer fails, a backup load balancer
will takeover, and it has state of almost all connections, so
that almost all established connections can continue to access
the service.
--stop-daemon
Stop the connection synchronization daemon.
-h, --help
Display a description of the command syntax.
PARAMETERS
The commands above accept or require zero or more of the following
parameters.
-t, --tcp-service service-address
Use TCP service. The service-address is of the form host[:port].
Host may be one of a plain IP address or a hostname. Port may be
either a plain port number or the service name of port. The Port
may be omitted, in which case zero will be used. A Port of zero
is only valid if the service is persistent as the -p|--persis‐
tent option, in which case it is a wild-card port, that is con‐
nections will be accepted to any port.
-u, --udp-service service-address
Use UDP service. See the -t|--tcp-service for the description of
the service-address.
-f, --fwmark-service integer
Use a firewall-mark, an integer value greater than zero, to
denote a virtual service instead of an address, port and proto‐
col (UDP or TCP). The marking of packets with a firewall-mark is
configured using the -m|--mark option to iptables(8). It can be
used to build a virtual service assoicated with the same real
servers, covering multiple IP address, port and protocol trip‐
plets.
Using firewall-mark virtual services provides a convenient
method of grouping together different IP addresses, ports and
protocols into a single virtual service. This is useful for both
simplifying configuration if a large number of virtual services
are required and grouping persistence across what would other‐
wise be multiple virtual services.
-s, --scheduler scheduling-method
scheduling-method Algorithm for allocating TCP connections and
UDP datagrams to real servers. Scheduling algorithms are imple‐
mented as kernel modules. Ten are shipped with the Linux Virtual
Server:
rr - Robin Robin: distributes jobs equally amongst the available
real servers.
wrr - Weighted Round Robin: assigns jobs to real servers propor‐
tionally to there real servers' weight. Servers with higher
weights receive new jobs first and get more jobs than servers
with lower weights. Servers with equal weights get an equal dis‐
tribution of new jobs.
lc - Least-Connection: assigns more jobs to real servers with
fewer active jobs.
wlc - Weighted Least-Connection: assigns more jobs to servers
with fewer jobs and relative to the real servers' weight
(Ci/Wi). This is the default.
lblc - Locality-Based Least-Connection: assigns jobs destined
for the same IP address to the same server if the server is not
overloaded and available; otherwise assign jobs to servers with
fewer jobs, and keep it for future assignment.
lblcr - Locality-Based Least-Connection with Replication:
assigns jobs destined for the same IP address to the least-con‐
nection node in the server set for the IP address. If all the
node in the server set are over loaded, it picks up a node with
fewer jobs in the cluster and adds it in the sever set for the
target. If the server set has not been modified for the speci‐
fied time, the most loaded node is removed from the server set,
in order to avoid high degree of replication.
dh - Destination Hashing: assigns jobs to servers through look‐
ing up a statically assigned hash table by their destination IP
addresses.
sh - Source Hashing: assigns jobs to servers through looking up
a statically assigned hash table by their source IP addresses.
sed - Shortest Expected Delay: assigns an incoming job to the
server with the shortest expected delay. The expected delay that
the job will experience is (Ci + 1) / Ui if sent to the ith
server, in which Ci is the number of jobs on the the ith server
and Ui is the fixed service rate (weight) of the ith server.
nq - Never Queue: assigns an incoming job to an idle server if
there is, instead of waiting for a fast one; if all the servers
are busy, it adopts the Shortest Expected Delay policy to assign
the job.
-p, --persistent [timeout]
Specify that a virtual service is persistent. If this option is
specified, multiple requests from a client are redirected to the
same real server selected for the first request. Optionally,
the timeout of persistent sessions may be specified given in
seconds, otherwise the default of 300 seconds will be used. This
option may be used in conjunction with protocols such as SSL or
FTP where it is important that clients consistently connect with
the same real server.
Note: If a virtual service is to handle FTP connections then
persistence must be set for the virtual service if Direct Rout‐
ing or Tunnelling is used as the forwarding mechanism. If Mas‐
querading is used in conjunction with an FTP service than per‐
sistence is not necessary, but the ip_vs_ftp kernel module must
be used. This module may be manually inserted into the kernel
using insmod(8).
-M, --netmask netmask
Specify the granularity with which clients are grouped for per‐
sistent virtual services. The source address of the request is
masked with this netmask to direct all clients from a network to
the same real server. The default is 255.255.255.255, that is,
the persistence granularity is per client host. Less specific
netmasks may be used to resolve problems with non-persistent
cache clusters on the client side.
-r, --real-server server-address
Real server that an associated request for service may be
assigned to. The server-address is the host address of a real
server, and may plus port. Host can be either a plain IP address
or a hostname. Port can be either a plain port number or the
service name of port. In the case of the masquerading method,
the host address is usually an RFC 1918 private IP address, and
the port can be different from that of the associated service.
With the tunneling and direct routing methods, port must be
equal to that of the service address. For normal services, the
port specified in the service address will be used if port is
not specified. For fwmark services, port may be omitted, in
which case the destination port on the real server will be the
destination port of the request sent to the virtual service.
[packet-forwarding-method]
-g, --gatewaying Use gatewaying (direct routing). This is the
default.
-i, --ipip Use ipip encapsulation (tunneling).
-m, --masquerading Use masquerading (network access transla‐
tion, or NAT).
Note: Regardless of the packet-forwarding mechanism specified,
real servers for addresses for which there are interfaces on the
local node will be use the local forwarding method, then packets
for the servers will be passed to upper layer on the local node.
This cannot be specified by ipvsadm, rather it set by the kernel
as real servers are added or modified.
-w, --weight weight
Weight is an integer specifying the capacity of a server rela‐
tive to the others in the pool. The valid values of weight are 0
through to 65535. The default is 1. Quiescent servers are speci‐
fied with a weight of zero. A quiescent server will receive no
new jobs but still serve the existing jobs, for all scheduling
algorithms distributed with the Linux Virtual Server. Setting a
quiescent server may be useful if the server is overloaded or
needs to be taken out of service for maintenance.
-x, --u-threshold uthreshold
uthreshold is an integer specifying the upper connection thresh‐
old of a server. The valid values of uthreshold are 0 through to
65535. The default is 0, which means the upper connection
threshold is not set. If uthreshold is set with other values, no
new connections will be sent to the server when the number of
its connections exceeds its upper connection threshold.
-y, --l-threshold lthreshold
lthreshold is an integer specifying the lower connection thresh‐
old of a server. The valid values of lthreshold are 0 through to
65535. The default is 0, which means the lower connection
threshold is not set. If lthreshold is set with other values,
the server will receive new connections when the number of its
connections drops below its lower connection threshold. If
lthreshold is not set but uthreshold is set, the server will
receive new connections when the number of its connections drops
below three forth of its upper connection threshold.
--mcast-interface interface
Specify the multicast interface that the sync master daemon
sends outgoing multicasts through, or the sync backup daemon
listens to for multicasts.
--syncid syncid
Specify the syncid that the sync master daemon fills in the Syn‐
cID header while sending multicast messages, or the sync backup
daemon uses to filter out multicast messages not matched with
the SyncID value. The valid values of syncid are 0 through to
255. The default is 0, which means no filtering at all.
-c, --connection
Connection output. The list command with this option will list
current IPVS connections.
--timeout
Timeout output. The list command with this option will display
the timeout values (in seconds) for TCP sessions, TCP sessions
after receiving a FIN packet, and UDP packets.
--daemon
Daemon information output. The list command with this option
will display the daemon status and its multicast interface.
--stats
Output of statistics information. The list command with this
option will display the statistics information of services and
their servers.
--rate Output of rate information. The list command with this option
will display the rate information (such as connections/second,
bytes/second and packets/second) of services and their servers.
--thresholds
Output of thresholds information. The list command with this
option will display the upper/lower connection threshold infor‐
mation of each server in service listing.
--persistent-conn
Output of persistent connection information. The list command
with this option will display the persistent connection counter
information of each server in service listing. The persistent
connection is used to forward the actual connections from the
same client/network to the same server.
--sort Sort the list of virtual services and real servers. The virtual
service entries are sorted in ascending order by <protocol,
address, port>. The real server entries are sorted in ascending
order by <address, port>.
-n, --numeric
Numeric output. IP addresses and port numbers will be printed
in numeric format rather than as as host names and services
respectively, which is the default.
EXAMPLE 1 - Simple Virtual Service
The following commands configure a Linux Director to distribute incom‐
ing requests addressed to port 80 on 207.175.44.110 equally to port 80
on five real servers. The forwarding method used in this example is
NAT, with each of the real servers being masqueraded by the Linux
Director.
ipvsadm-A -t 207.175.44.110:80 -s rr
ipvsadm-a -t 207.175.44.110:80 -r 192.168.10.1:80 -m
ipvsadm-a -t 207.175.44.110:80 -r 192.168.10.2:80 -m
ipvsadm-a -t 207.175.44.110:80 -r 192.168.10.3:80 -m
ipvsadm-a -t 207.175.44.110:80 -r 192.168.10.4:80 -m
ipvsadm-a -t 207.175.44.110:80 -r 192.168.10.5:80 -m
Alternatively, this could be achieved in a single ipvsadm command.
echo "
-A -t 207.175.44.110:80 -s rr
-a -t 207.175.44.110:80 -r 192.168.10.1:80 -m
-a -t 207.175.44.110:80 -r 192.168.10.2:80 -m
-a -t 207.175.44.110:80 -r 192.168.10.3:80 -m
-a -t 207.175.44.110:80 -r 192.168.10.4:80 -m
-a -t 207.175.44.110:80 -r 192.168.10.5:80 -m
" | ipvsadm-R
As masquerading is used as the forwarding mechanism in this example,
the default route of the real servers must be set to the linux direc‐
tor, which will need to be configured to forward and masquerade pack‐
ets. This can be achieved using the following commands:
echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
EXAMPLE 2 - Firewall-Mark Virtual Service
The following commands configure a Linux Director to distribute incom‐
ing requests addressed to any port on 207.175.44.110 or 207.175.44.111
equally to the corresponding port on five real servers. As per the pre‐
vious example, the forwarding method used in this example is NAT, with
each of the real servers being masqueraded by the Linux Director.
ipvsadm-A -f 1 -s rr
ipvsadm-a -f 1 -r 192.168.10.1:0 -m
ipvsadm-a -f 1 -r 192.168.10.2:0 -m
ipvsadm-a -f 1 -r 192.168.10.3:0 -m
ipvsadm-a -f 1 -r 192.168.10.4:0 -m
ipvsadm-a -f 1 -r 192.168.10.5:0 -m
As masquerading is used as the forwarding mechanism in this example,
the default route of the real servers must be set to the linux direc‐
tor, which will need to be configured to forward and masquerade pack‐
ets. The real server should also be configured to mark incoming packets
addressed to any port on 207.175.44.110 and 207.175.44.111 with fire‐
wall-mark 1. If FTP traffic is to be handled by this virtual service,
then the ip_vs_ftp kernel module needs to be inserted into the kernel.
These operations can be achieved using the following commands:
echo "1" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
modprobe ip_tables
iptables -A PREROUTING -t mangle -d 207.175.44.110/31 -j MARK --set-mark 1
modprobe ip_vs_ftp
NOTES
The Linux Virtual Server implements three defense strategies against
some types of denial of service (DoS) attacks. The Linux Director cre‐
ates an entry for each connection in order to keep its state, and each
entry occupies 128 bytes effective memory. LVS's vulnerability to a DoS
attack lies in the potential to increase the number entries as much as
possible until the linux director runs out of memory. The three defense
strategies against the attack are: Randomly drop some entries in the
table. Drop 1/rate packets before forwarding them. And use secure tcp
state transition table and short timeouts. The strategies are con‐
trolled by sysctl variables and corresponding entries in the /proc
filesystem:
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/drop_entry /proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/drop_packet
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/secure_tcp
Valid values for each variable are 0 through to 3. The default value is
0, which disables the respective defense strategy. 1 and 2 are auto‐
matic modes - when there is no enough available memory, the respective
strategy will be enabled and the variable is automatically set to 2,
otherwise the strategy is disabled and the variable is set to 1. A
value of 3 denotes that the respective strategy is always enabled. The
available memory threshold and secure TCP timeouts can be tuned using
the sysctl variables and corresponding entries in the /proc filesystem:
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/amemthresh /proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_*
FILES
/proc/net/ip_vs
/proc/net/ip_vs_app
/proc/net/ip_vs_conn
/proc/net/ip_vs_stats
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/am_droprate
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/amemthresh
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/drop_entry
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/drop_packet
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/secure_tcp
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_close
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_closewait
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_established
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_finwait
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_icmp
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_lastack
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_listen
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_synack
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_synrecv
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_synsent
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_timewait
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/timeout_udp
SEE ALSO
The LVS web site (http://www.linuxvirtualserver.org/) for more documen‐
tation about LVS.
ipvsadm-save(8), ipvsadm-restore(8), iptables(8),
insmod(8), modprobe(8)AUTHORSipvsadm - Wensong Zhang <wensong@linuxvirtualserver.org>
Peter Kese <peter.kese@ijs.si>
man page - Mike Wangsmo <wanger@redhat.com>
Wensong Zhang <wensong@linuxvirtualserver.org>
Horms <horms@verge.net.au>
4th Berkeley Distribution 5th July 2003 IPVSADM(8)
