Thread: Network Hardware

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.

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.

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.

Zeus ZXTM

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.

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

We resell both..

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.

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?

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.

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...