Open Source applications are even better in many ways, but that is another story ….
We started using an online web site chat service a while back, as it’s an invaluable sales and support tool for us. When we did a quick reckon of the market we quickly came across a problem. It was that old chestnut platform compatibility, we use a mixture of Macs, Linux (mainly Ubuntu) & a few sales guys on Windows.
“Where can I find good quality Load Balancer information?”
Well that depends if you want it to be biased or not. A lot of our competitors have started setting up dodgy comparison sites highlighting their best features and ignoring the draw backs.
I’m not saying that I’m un-biased when it comes to load balancers I have a pretty strong opinion. But, as far as I’m aware the chart bellow is an accurate comparison of load balancing hardware, price, performance and capability:
I was reading a post by Tony Bourke “license to SSL“about the licencing restrictions of Verisign et al. when it comes to web sites running on clusters.
He noted a common mis-conception that if you host the SSL cert on the load balancer then you negate the need to pay for one licence per server..
WRONG… you still need to pay for each server in the cluster… wow and I thought it was bad enough to get charged for physicaly copying the cert…
Direct Routing aka. Direct Server Return (DSR) is a great load balancing method, the idea being that incoming traffic comes into the Virtual IP (VIP) on the load balancer.
Then all the load balancer does is change the destination MAC address of the packet (to one of the destination real servers in the pool) and flips it back to the switch which duefully delivers the packets to the selected real server.
The packet will say “Hello are you the VIP?”
Then the real server will say, “Get lost no I’m not!”.
