Re: Load balancing appliances...

"Joe R. Lindsay" <[email protected]> writes:

> Any good experience or advice out there to share?  My goto
> buddy for this is using F5, but suggested I look at NetScaler,
> another friend of mine wrote a book on Cisco content switching...
> So I have 3 vendors I have to look at, but don't have much
> real world commentary...who out there has that??

I chose F5 because of previous positive experience with their support,
and because their software let us examine and base decisions on any
content on any port (we're doing POP, IMAP, LDAP and a bunch non WWW
stuff).  It does SSL termination, different boxes and different
licenses offer different throughputs.  They're not cheap but they work
well. Foundry and most of the others only allowed very limited
decision making based on content in transit and were focused on web
traffic, but they were less expensive.

For  a lab setting where I was evaluating Tomcat clusters, I used the
free PEN balancer.  It claims to do SSL termination but I haven't
tried that feature.  The site gives some examples  for clustering PEN
boxes to you don't have a single point of failure on the balancer.
It's nifty and seems to work well.

  http://siag.nu/pub/pen/