[BBLISA] Load balancers

[Rob Taylor]

Hi Matt. Thanks for the reply.

The authentication is ldaps.

We are only looking to use the load balancer for internal use, no
external use is planned. (I'm not a fan of devices straddling boundaries
like that anyway). I think we would use it more for service redundancy
than for actual load distribution most of the time.
Most of the services that we might use it for are not heavily used, (not
a ton of connections per second or anything).

rgt


On 3/11/13 11:02 PM, Matt Finnigan wrote:
> 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
> <mailto: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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