[AusNOG] Experiences with web load balancers

[Andreux Fort]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 9:12 AM, Michael Richardson
<lists at mikerichardson.com.au> 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.
> Specific features I'm looking for include:
>
> Thousands of requests/second (ASIC-based logic for forwarding would be
> ideal)
> Translation of internal NATted addresses to external real addresses (while
> still handling lots and lots of requests at/near wire-speed)
> SSL offloading
> Content acceleration
> Fault tolerance between multiple LBs

Netscalers have a following and will do what you need; but if you're
building a service rather than taking money from clients who can't do
it themselves, I'd really recommend putting that money into hiring one
or two people with skills  to write your own implementation (or better
yet, release an open source one :-).  This is an area where a PC with
a well written piece of code is well and truly adequate for the load
your clients will be able to generate.

-a