active/active load balancing

Hi guys,

I would like to pick up your brains.

I need to build a robust and reliable load balancing cluster on nginx. The trouble with that is I'm going to spread the load horizontally what means I will have multiple "same level" nginx boxes with a single VIP on one of them. I would like to pass the traffic to all the nodes in that cluster as well to the "director" so the node which handles the VIP and load balance that traffic across the backends.

So for example I have something like that:

INTERNET -> VIP -> nginx {0-9} -> backend apache {0-100}.

Let's assume VIP sits on nginx0 and when for example we will deal with 1000 connections I want nginx0 to spread the load evenly across the cluster (nginx0-9) so in theory every nginx box should have 100 connections at the same time and process the reuqests.

I'm not sure if my scenario is quite real so would like to ask you about the ideas or use cases.

Thank you in advance for your help.

Regards.
Thorwald