What is Keepalived ?

Keepalived is a routing software written in C. The main goal of this project is to provide simple and robust facilities for loadbalancing and high-availability to Linux system and Linux based infrastructures. Loadbalancing framework relies on well-known and widely used Linux Virtual Server (IPVS) kernel module providing Layer4 loadbalancing. Keepalived implements a set of checkers to dynamically and adaptively maintain and manage loadbalanced server pool according their health. On the other hand high-availability is achieved by VRRP protocol. VRRP is a fundamental brick for router failover. In addition, Keepalived implements a set of hooks to the VRRP finite state machine providing low-level and high-speed protocol interactions. In order to offer fastest network failure detection, Keepalived implements BFD protocol. VRRP state transition can take into account BFD hint to drive fast state transition. Keepalived frameworks can be used independently or all together to provide resilient infrastructures.

Keepalived is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Keepalived main website doesn't offer package for any Linux distribution, it only provides source code and code repository. Most of Linux distribution are offering Keepalived package as a mainline package and package maintainers are making a great job maintaining and reporting issues about it.

[June 13, 2020] Keepalived version 2.1.0 is out. There is lot of improvements and hardwork revisiting the whole code to make it even stronger. This release target carrier-grade quality and requirements. We also changed the release process to replace previous one by Release Notes.

[January 22, 2020] Keepalived version 2.0.20 is out ! We are happy to announce it to be really really STABLE after strong debugging iterations done during last year. We are now going to push some new features and extensions.

[July 26, 2019] Honored to be referenced by VA Technical Reference Model of U.S. Dept of Veterans Affairs.

[May 26, 2019] Created Keepalived Twitter Account. Will publish release announces and updates.

[May 24, 2019] Created Keepalived Users Group at Groups.io. This group will replace old SourceForge Keepalived mailing list (keepalived-devel and keepalived-announce). Unfortunately I cant relocate current membership to new Group since SF removed this feature.

[May 16, 2019] Design a new LOGO for Keepalived. You can access LOGO here or in the download section.

[October 21, 2018] This short note to encourage every package mainteners to update keepalived distro package. Most of current version shipped with major distro are stuck to 1.3.X release. Keepalived code present in git master branch must be considered as stable and futur proof. We do not backport bugfixes and extensions to previous release, dev circle is an allways forward release process. So you are strongly encouraged to upgrade to last 2.X release which provides extensive work, extensions and bugfixes.

[May 26, 2018] Dear Keepalived Users and companies using it. Keepalived Core-Team has just released MAJOR release with version code 2.0.0. This Release is the fruit of around 2years of hard work and we would appreciate your feedback and broadcast this announce all over. This release enhance lots of software components targetting high performances. Thanks for your attention & support. -- Alexandre

This release brings improvements and fix some issues reported. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

Minutes release to fix minor regression. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This release brings improvements and fix some minor issues reported. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This release brings improvements and fix some minor issues reported. It add some new VRRP and BFD features as well. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This release brings lots of improvements and fix some minor issues reported. It add some new VRRP features as well. Stability has been even more extended. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This release fix some minor build issues brought by last release. All coverity open issues are fixed. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This release add some new features and fix some minor bugs. genhash utility is now part of the mainline daemon. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This release fix some minor systemd integration issues. Its drops old kernel related support. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This release fix some minor regressions brought by last release. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This release bring a bunch of new features and extensions. This release targetted corner cases and resilient handling. This release is a major milestone for us ! please consider upgrading, this is the fruit of hard stabilization and non-regression effort. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This is a minute fix release, fixing regression on include directive. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This release extend some documentation elements. Some fix for the building process. DNS_CHECK fix and extensions. Properly handle ipvs_sync_daemon. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This release fix 2 uninitialized list which can lead to a SEGV when using track_process or track_bfd. There are some minor fixes, IPVS configurations improvements and some cosmetics. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

This is a minute fix release. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

Lot of efforts have been put all together to make this new release even more robust. Refer to Release Notes for more infos.

Fix track process and track script features. Some BFD extensions and cleanup. Reworked debug configuration. Snap updates. Docker updates. Add support to set pref lft for static and virtual IPv6 addresses. Refer to ChangeLog for more infos.

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