[AusNOG] Experiences with web load balancers

[Andy Davidson]

On 14 Jan 2010, at 23:12, Michael Richardson wrote:

> 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,
[...]
> 	• Thousands of requests/second

How are you scaling the boxes you  have to this ?

> 	• 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

I really miss the Redline Networks reverse proxies, because these also made fantastic load-sharing and load-balancing boxes.  Juniper bought them and binned the line.

I have deployed Coyotepoint load balancers for smaller sites with great success.

I have deployed mod_proxy_balancer / apache based reverse proxies for sites with a decent Linux-aware operational team in place with great success.

I really want to deploy the A10 load balancer system because they have put a lot of effort into building v6 support into their product, but sadly I am a terrible person because I keep forgetting to return their calls.

If you are dropping load balancers in to help you scale rather than just for availability, then remember that there are big wins to get from front-to-back - don't ignore back end improvements and leave it all to the load-balancer.

</brain_dump>

Let is know what you go for and why.

Andy




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Regards, Andy Davidson       +44 (0)20 7993 1700       www.netsumo.com
NetSumo  Specialist networks consultancy for ISPs, Whitelabel 24/7 NOC