[AusNOG] Experiences with web load balancers

[David Hughes]

Hi

My hands-on experience covers Foundry, Cisco, and F5.  We run a lot of F5 BigIP's at present.  They are an amazingly capable and flexible device.  There is so much functionality under the hood that you probably would be hard pressed to find a corner case that couldn't be handled.  And they perform quite well.

BUT, and there's always a but, they have major failings too :-

1. Their software QA is bad.  We've had more show-stopper bugs than I'd care to recount.  When we find a stable code version we tend to stay there until it's nolonger supported.

2. Capacity management and forecasting is very, very difficult.  Virtually impossible.

3. They don't come cheap.  Must admit the current generation of boxes has helped as each level in the product set has jumped to the performance of the level above from the last model range.

4. Their maintenance costs are mind blowing.  TCO of these boxes is very significant.

I have a love / hate relationship with the F5 kit :-)  I have done some amazing things with them (like advertising /32's for VIPs directly off the loadbalancer via BGP and re-routing services between datacentres on server failures etc) but the reliability and maintenance charges make me want to look elsewhere regularly.

If you don't need the high-end functionality that these boxes offer then something like the current ServerIrons may be a more cost effective solution.  Haven't played with ServerIrons for quite a few years now so I'd be interested if anyone has feedback on the current models and code.


David
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On 15/01/2010, at 9:12 AM, Michael Richardson wrote:

> Hi list,
> 
> We've all been so political lately... maybe this will help get some
> technical talk back up in the list...
> 
> I'm wondering if anyone would be able to make some recommendations on their
> experiences with web-farm load balancers. In a previous job I'd installed
> and configured some Cisco ACE 4710s, and found them to be pretty solid, but
> now I'm in the market to buy some more and I'm wondering if there are better
> options out there. I'm a CCNP, so I'm leaning towards Cisco, but the 4710s
> aren't really Cisco boxes anyway, just re-badged Arrowpoints.