Many people may not be aware that you can turn commodity hardware into a Mikrotik OS and there are various options which is "CHR" (Cloud Hosted Router) which is a VMimage meant for Virtualization only (seriously, I've tried to dd the image to a physical server and it just crashed as it does not contain any drivers for physical).
One note as well if you are trying to do a baremetal install you may get an error "Error Loading Operating System" or........
You can find it for free at http://nginx.org/ I find nginx is simpler to setup than pound (it's not hard but I found it unintuitive and annoying), it seemed to make some basic setups overly complicated with the config file syntax.
nginx on the other hand is perfectly suited in everyway, it is even simpler to setup and seems to be the most stable and most efficient any load balancer. I would go as far as to say that a good nginx setup is more relia........