[BBLISA] Load balancers

[Matt Finnigan]

Generic answers to this are only going to be of minor help for you. Knowing
more about your specific use cases (particularly, what protocols you're
using for authentication) will help a lot.

Also, we don't know your architecture. Unless you have a flat network, a
single load-balancer for authentication (typically on the back end) won't
help you with web load-balancing (typically on the front end) - unless your
LB has a lot of interfaces and you're OK with it straddling your DMZ and
internal networks. And, like I said, without knowing what protocols you
need, a web LB might not be the right fit for your auth needs.

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 10:53 PM, Rob Taylor <rgt at wi.mit.edu> wrote:

> Hi Guys. We have some applications here that either can't or can't easily
> support connections to redundant servers for authentication,
> and another application that has been known to beat the tar out of the
> single authentication server it uses.
> I was asked to look into it and some talk had came up about looking into a
> load balancer for distributing the load, or at least making it so that the
> less capable clients can failover to another server.
> I'm sure we would find other uses for it besides this, like web
> redirection during server outages/maintenance, and possibly distributing
> logins to cluster login nodes.
>
> Right now, our needs are pretty meager. I've started looking at a some
> software ones, like balanceNG, HAproxy, to see what they can do.
> I've also downloaded a demo of stingray, which used to be known as Zeus.
> Coyote point also makes a very inexpensive starter hardware model, $2k
> list.
> I've got cisco gear in house, but none that seem to support SLB or I would
> have looked at that as well.
>
> Load balancers are a technology that I've never really had a chance to
> play with, so I don't really know what to look for and what to avoid.
> Can anyone out there provide any insight on products that they have used,
> what they have used them for and their experiences?
>
> Thanks.
>
> rgt
>
> Whitehead Network/System Administrator
>
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