Network Hardware

ChrisOlver · 15th September 2008

Hi Guys,

Anyone got any recommendations for a hardware load balancer or can point me in the correct direction at what to look at? I've got a client here who is using Windows load balancer/software based load balancer but is finding that its just not keeping up.

Ta for your help.

freethought · 15th September 2008

Personal favourites are the Foundry ServerIron range or the Cisco ACE modules for the 6500 chassis
Both can have hardware SSL offload and if you really want can do global server load balancing accross multiple data centres.
The ServerIrons scale right the way from small 1U boxes through to chassis. Cisco have appliance versions of the ACE if I remember correctly but the real advantage of the ACE service modules is that you can put them in the same 6500 chassis you're using for switching/routing if you have a high end set up. They also support virtulization so you can host multiple seperate clients on them if you want to provide them as a service. I can't remember to what extend the Foundrys do off the top of my head.

JamesSykes · 15th September 2008

HAProxy

Extremely high performance. I don't think there is anything out there that comes close.

Recently used it for a big televised event sitting in front of 16 app servers. It's a piece of piss to setup and doesn't need alot of hardware. I stuck it on DL360 with a 2.4Ghz Xeon. Didn't go above 20% utilisation and it was handling 100k pageviews a minute. (something like 500k hits/minute)

Using something like heartbeat and keepalive you can have a full HA/DR load balancer setup for peanuts that outperforms high end kit.

markcastle · 15th September 2008

Zeus ZXTM

racksense · 15th September 2008

Chris,

I think that unless you have some serious budget then you will be looking at an open source solution - I would expect most budget 'hardware' solutions are embedded/PC + Linux underneath + well known open source packages.

All the real solutions are custom designed hardware and you would have to expect some serious budget.

We've just been demo'ed a great load balancer and accelerator product that is custom hardware, 7 independent CPUs - very clever piece of kit indeed, I'm not expecting it to be very budget.

gavint · 15th September 2008

Depends what you're looking for - F5 just bought out some nice new low-end BIG-IP boxes and are the market leader, but you pay for it...

Citrix Netscaler is supposed to be a good alternative with a slightly lower cost, although I've not used it personally.

BIG-IP can eat Cisco ACE blades for breakfast. Easy to configure, amazing throughput and good layer 7 features.

The trouble with hardware load balancers is that as it's pointless replacing one single point of failure with another, you always have to have two of them.

Gavin

samb · 15th September 2008

Citrix Netscaler if you have a very large site and/or need SSL offload, Linux HAProxy solution otherwise.

We resell both..

ChrisOlver · 15th September 2008

Hi Paul,

This isn't for a budget solution so if you can highly recommend a model (and give me a rough example of costing) then ill happily submit it to the guys.

Ill take a gander at HAProxy.

JamesC · 16th September 2008

One thing I don't get is lots of people seem to have one load balancer and N web servers, I know one load balancer can handle a hell of a lot more load than one web server, but surely from a redundancy point of view, having just one is a bit silly?

markcastle · 16th September 2008

sometimes thats the only fit where
a) The budget doesn't stretch to a more resilient solution and/or
b) more complexity required by a fully redundant solution isn't desired.

I guess there is no getting around the fact that clients drive budgets, regardless of whether or not it's actually the best thing for the job or not.

JamesSykes · 16th September 2008

Quote:

Originally Posted by JamesC

One thing I don't get is lots of people seem to have one load balancer and N web servers, I know one load balancer can handle a hell of a lot more load than one web server, but surely from a redundancy point of view, having just one is a bit silly?

Probably the same sort of people that have a single DB server behind those N app servers. Just depends whether you have the cash to be fully redundant because there isn't much point having two load balancers if you only have a single switch etc...

vincento · 24th September 2008

One of the main questions is : are you doing SSL offloading or is it just plain HTTP ? We have seen situations where SSL-offloading kill some devices within minutes, while others can stand a fair amount of traffic.

Next you should ask how your network is setup. What is the speed of the webservers and the maximum throughput you want to achieve ?

gavint · 24th September 2008

If you're doing SSL offload you need to look for something that has an SSL accelerator - F5 use Cavium chips for this in most models.

Gavin

vincento · 25th September 2008

Foundry also has some very interesting products. Their starter product is the ServerIron 4G-SSL.This unit has 4 x 1g combo-ports (copper and fibre) and can handle a bulk throughput of 500 Mbps, with around 1500 connections per second and 5000 transactions per second (only SSL-handshakes). In comparison, you could take a look at a cisco 11501. We experienced result where a throughput of around 70 mbit per second (around 200 sessions) takes the CPU to around 45 %.

bleem2k · 26th October 2008

I'll second the F5 vote, expensive but top notch boxes. Check the hardware specs PDF on their website and spec accordingly.

If you are thinking about SSL offload on to the F5s then you'll need an additional license and these are priced according to the TPS (transactions per second) you want it to be able to process.

Used them for over a year now and not had any hicups.