Load Balancing Digest

I was on a run in my new home of Portland, Oregon when I came upon an AMC Pacer parked on the street.  And I thought, how like the old Alteons the AMC Pacer is.  They’re both rather odd looking, and have a rather fanatical fan following (as evidenced in it being in a starring [...]

EtherChannel is a strange creature.  It’s generally known as a way to load balance Ethernet traffic over multiple links.  Need more than 1 Gigabit of throughput, but don’t have 10 Gigabit interfaces yet?  Then bond two Gigabit links together in an EtherChannel link, and you’ve got 2 Gigabits.  That’s the idea, at least.  However, it’s [...]

One of the most common problems that afflict load balancing situations is the “same subnet” problem. This is when a client tries to browse a Virtual Service/VIP from the same subnet as the real servers. Lately, I’ve seen this come up on the mailing list. See here (and my response) [...]

Happy Friday the 13th, everyone.  I have a couple of quick items, that I think those following the SLB market might find interesting.
* Another SLB vendor has hit my radar, a company called A10 Networks. They have a Layer 4-7 load balancer from the looks of it, but I’m not sure of what their [...]

I posted this in reference to a question about load balancing database servers. It’s a PowerPoint given at a PHP conference in ‘05 given by John Allspaw of Flickr. It’s quite a good read, and talks about challenges that they faced when massively scaling an appliance load balancing solution for MySQL.

On March 1st, a user asked the asked a question about what they might do to fix the DST problem (Daylight Savings Time), since it’s changing this year, for older F5 BIG-IP systems that were out of contract and ineligible for code fixes.
Steve Lothspeich was kind enough to post a fix for the DST problem.

Occasionally there are posts on the Load Balancing Mailing List that bring up very interesting issues that are worthy of particular note. So, from time to time, I will be highlighting certain posts on the LB Digest.
Recently member Cihan Subasi posted an interesting question on the state of Firewall Load Balancing. The poster [...]