LVS is a free and open-source project started by Wensong Zhang in May 1998, subject to the requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2.

The mission of the project is to build a high-performance and highly available server for Linux using clustering technology, which provides good scalability, reliability and serviceability.

The major work of the LVS project is now to develop advanced IP load balancing software (IPVS), application-level load balancing software (KTCPVS), and cluster management components.

LVS is able to handle UDP, TCP layer-4 protocols as well as FTP passive connection by inspecting layer-7 packets.

The userland utility program used to configure LVS is called ipvsadm, which requires superuser privileges to run.