The load balancer does the work of switching the destination IP back to the virtual IP originally typed in by the user and passes along the response to the user. The server accepts the connection and sends back a response to the user via the load balancer. Your load balancer decides which server should handle the request and changes the destination IP to match the IP address of this server. In the most basic case, which of course looks nothing like your network, load balancing works something like this:Ī user tries to access a service and contacts your load balancer. How does a basic load balancing transaction go down?
Inetwork load status software#
However, if the load you are balancing is light and your budget is pretty bare bones, a software load balancer may do the trick. Plus, hardware load balancers generally come with a service contract, so there is a neck other than your own to choke should something go wrong. While both can be effective, hardware load balancers tend to be richer in features and better at scaling. What’s the difference between software and hardware load balancers? Some also include cool bells and whistles like firewall and network intrusion prevention, too.
Because load balancing involves multiple servers, load balancer devices usually include failover and backup features to accommodate system failures. The server cluster ensures high availability as well as fault tolerance. Load balancing requires a server cluster, two or more servers that operate as a single unit. If you are using TCP/IP, your load balancer operates across WAN, if you’re using HTTP, it works across several Web servers providing the same service, and so on. Because they sit outside of your application servers, they act as a sort of proxy server that then routes client requests to the appropriate physical server for processing. Most load balancers are a dedicated device, which you plug in to your network. What does a network load balancer look like?
Load balancers can also come in handy if your business is distributed geographically, making sure that everyone has speedy access no matter where they are physically sitting. The point of load balancing is to spread the work around so that user requests can be processed faster. Network load balancers let you distribute network traffic across several servers or network nodes. With your users dependent on constant network connectivity, a critical piece of your IT infrastructure is the ability to intelligently manage your network loads.