Construct a highly available Apache Web server cluster that spans multiple physical or virtual Linux® servers in 5 easy steps with Linux Virtual Server and Heartbeat v2.
To get the most out of this article, you should be familiar with Linux and basic networking, and you should have Apache servers already configured. Our examples are based on standard SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 (SLES10) installations, but savvy users of other distributions should be able to adapt the methods shown here.
Article illustrates the robust Apache Web server stack with 6 Apache server nodes (though 3 nodes is sufficient for following the steps outlined here) as well as 3 Linux Virtual Server (LVS) directors. We used 6 Apache server nodes to drive higher workload throughputs during testing and thereby simulate larger deployments. The architecture presented here should scale to many more directors and backend Apache servers as your resources permit, but we haven’t tried anything larger ourselves. Figure 1 shows our implementation using the Linux Virtual Server and the linux-ha.org components.
As shown in Figure 1, the external clients send traffic to a single IP address, which may exist on any of the LVS director machines. The director machines actively monitor the pool of Web servers they relay work to.
Note that the workload progresses from the left side of Figure 1 toward the right. The floating resource address for this cluster will reside on one of the LVS director instances at any given time. The service address may be moved manually through a graphical configuration utility, or (more commonly) it can be self-managing, depending on the state of the LVS directors. Should any director become ineligible (due to loss of connectivity, software failure, or similar) the service address will be relocated automatically to an eligible director.
The floating service address must span two or more discrete hardware instances in order to continue operation with the loss of one physical machine. With the configuration decisions presented in this article, each LVS director is able to forward packets to any real Apache Web server regardless of physical location or proximity to the active director providing the floating service address. This article shows how each of the LVS directors can actively monitor the Apache servers in order to ensure requests are sent only to operational back-end servers.
.
Source: 
i think Sun is the biggest contributer of open sourcing