Cisco Load Balancing for Virtual Servers
- Crucial Paradigm offers load balancing for Linux & Windows Virtual Server customers. The solution offered is built around redundant Cisco Hardware Load Balancers.
- Cost
- $100/month per Virtual Server
- For more information on this product please contact us on 1300 884 839 or sales@crucial.com.au
What is Load Balancing?
- Load Balancing is a method of distributing workload across two or more computers. Common reasons for implementing a load balanced solution are to maximize throughput, avoid overload and to increase reliability through redundancy.
- Configuration Options
- Active/Active — Traffic intended for the failed node is either passed onto an existing node or load balanced across the remaining nodes.
- N+1 — provides a single extra node that is brought online to take over the role of the node that has failed. This normally refers to clusters which have multiple services running simultaneously; in the single service case, this degenerates to Active/Passive. Additionally you can implement N+N where N refers to the number of additional nodes required to sustain redundancy.
Crucial Paradigm Solution - Cisco Load Balancers
- Crucial Paradigm has implemented Cisco Hardware load balancers in an N+1 Scenario. Detailed information regarding the hardware is available below.
- Performance Summary
- Connections
- 1 million concurrent TCP connections
- 165,000 connection setups per second - Layer 4
- Throughput
- Total combined throughput of 4 Gbps (client to server and server to client)
- 1.25 million packets per second
- High Performance
- The Cisco CSM performs up to 165,000 new Layer 4 TCP connection setups per second and up to one million concurrent connections. These connections can be sent to 4000 virtual servers through any of the available switch ports to up to 16,000 real servers or devices. The capability to use one or any switch port provides a benefit over products that use distributed architectures requiring the use of all ports to gain maximum performance.
- Network Configurations
- The Cisco CSM supports many different network topology types. A Cisco CSM can operate in a mixed bridged and routed configuration, allowing traffic to flow from the client side to the server side on the same or on different IP subnets.
- IP Protocol Support
- The Cisco CSM accommodates a wide range of common IP protocols—including TCP and User Datagram Protocol (UDP). Additionally, the Cisco CSM supports higher-level protocols, including HTTP, FTP, Telnet, Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), Domain Name System (DNS), and Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP).
- Load-Balancing Algorithms
- The Cisco CSM supports the following load-balancing algorithms:
- Round Robin
- Weighted Round Robin
- Least Connections
- Weighted Least Connections
- Source and/or Destination IP Hash (subnet mask also configurable)
- URL Hashing
- URL and Cookie-Based Load Balancing
- The Cisco CSM allows full regular expression pattern matching for policies based on URLs, cookies, and HTTP header fields. The Cisco CSM supports any URL or cookie format—allowing it to load balance existing Web content without requiring URL or cookie format changes.
- High Availability
- The Cisco CSM continually monitors server and application availability using a variety of probes, in-band health monitoring, return code checking, and the Dynamic Feedback Protocol (DFP). When a real server or gateway failure occurs, the Cisco CSM redirects traffic to a different location. Servers are added and removed without disrupting service—systems easily are scaled up or down.
- Connection Redundancy
- Two Cisco CSMs can be configured in a fault-tolerant configuration to share state information about user sessions and provide hitless connection redundancy—an important requirement for e-commerce sites and sites where encryption is used. If an active Cisco CSM fails, open connections quickly are switched to a standby Cisco CSM without interruption, providing failover that is transparent to the user.
- Stickiness based on SSL session ID, source IP address, cookie or HTTP redirection
- Cookie insert enabling the ability to use cookies for stickiness even if the back-end application is not able to set a cookie
- Cookie offset and length, allowing an administrator to define the static portion of a dynamic cookie to use for persistence
- The Cisco CSM synchronizes persistence information from an active Cisco CSM to backup Cisco CSM to provide a failover that is transparent to a user.
- User Session Persistence
- In many cases it is important that an end user consistently is directed to the same end device for the duration of a session. This is particularly important where SSL is employed for data encryption or where shopping carts are used, as in e-commerce environments. The Cisco CSM offers the following solutions to provide session persistence to ensure that a client request goes to the proper end device:
- High Performance Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Protection
- The Cisco CSM provides a last line of defense for a data center with the ability to fend off malicious traffic, such as that typical of a SYN attack. In addition to protecting a data center from malicious traffic, the Cisco CSM continues to operate and forward valid client requests to ensure that services are not interrupted.
- Firewall Load Balancing
- The Cisco CSM allows organizations to scale firewall protection by distributing traffic across multiple firewall devices while ensuring that all packets belonging to a particular connection go through the same firewall. Both stealth and regular firewalls are supported.
