software load balancing vs hardware load balancing
 

We have our custom software to balance our server load. How many of you have hardware load balancing solution in your datacenter? If you are using hardware load balancer, please let me know the product.

We manage a few different types of hardware load balancers inside the DC. Our primary choice for a vendor is F5. We have a few sets of the Big IP 1500 and a pair of LTM6400. The LTM's are used both as a load balancer and application firewall. We have deployed the Citrix Netscalars with great success for many customers. The Cisco CSS devices were hated by the Network Engineers but have seemed to hold up over the years.

For the specialized hardware balancing, I'm currently a fan of the F5 BigIP's.. just started working with them and have found them much better to work with than Cisco's CSS/CSM offerings.

Software wise, I've run clusters that have been fronted by a very heavily modified LVS and various scripts on the nodes to provide constant updates so it can calculate very precise weightings (based on things like disk, memory and CPU usage as well as more specifics to the application like mails in the queue) and has proved to be very successful.

With LVS we could scale to around 60 nodes in a cluster before it started to struggle with updates and getting a little confused.

You may also want to look at Foundry Networks (now Brocade) ServerIron. They are fairly resilient and depending upon the model, scalable as well.

For smaller solutions, LVS is just a good solution.

Here it's all done in house, so it wouldn't really help to know their names. We hired a team of highly skilled people to develop them.

Did they base their framework on another project or start from the ground up?

We are now currently having few different types of hardware load balancing in our datacenter. We are currently using F5 and to be precise it is much better than other competitors. Most of the other datacenters I know are currently using F5 for hardware load balancing.

Foundry Networks (now Brocade) ServerIron is what i actually using now, its really works to me



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