Recommend me a load balancer

[RadiclDreamer]

Been looking at quite a few, Radware, cisco and loadbalander.org stand out as some pretty nice ones but I'm still weighing my options. Any thoughts?

 

[spidey07]

F5 or Cisco ACE.

 

[bobdole369]

Depends on the app - How big an office? Any special requirements?

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Its for a hospital, patient record web portal. Need something small and easy to use. has approx 2000 users accessing it, but roughly 100 at a time.

 

[ccbadd]

pfsense: http://doc.pfsense.org/index.p...i_WAN_/_Load_Balancing
Install on a decent Dell server and your gold.

 

[spidey07]

ccbadd - that doesn't look like a load balancer at all. A load balancer balances applications and services and includes robust means of controlling stickiness be it via a cookie or many other options. I don't see anything in there the probes applications on real servers to make sure the application is up and operational and available to receive content requests?

 

[Jamsan]

Originally posted by: spidey07
ccbadd - that doesn't look like a load balancer at all. A load balancer balances applications and services and includes robust means of controlling stickiness be it via a cookie or many other options. I don't see anything in there the probes applications on real servers to make sure the application is up and operational and available to receive content requests?

The originally post didn't necessarily specify an application load balancer. Radware and Cisco both offer WAN/Routing load balancing, so the confusion can easily have been made..

There are tons of options for app load balancing out there.. What's your budget look like? A pair of F5 3600's will easily set you back close to 50k. Coyote makes decent units and are considerably less than F5 units (www.coyotepoint.com). Radware makes them, Barracuda, Cisco, Kemp, Foundry, Zeus, and the list goes on and on....

Do you have any specific needs that can help narrow down between manufacturers?

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: Jamsan

Originally posted by: spidey07
ccbadd - that doesn't look like a load balancer at all. A load balancer balances applications and services and includes robust means of controlling stickiness be it via a cookie or many other options. I don't see anything in there the probes applications on real servers to make sure the application is up and operational and available to receive content requests?

The originally post didn't necessarily specify an application load balancer. Radware and Cisco both offer WAN/Routing load balancing, so the confusion can easily have been made..

There are tons of options for app load balancing out there.. What's your budget look like? A pair of F5 3600's will easily set you back close to 50k. Coyote makes decent units and are considerably less than F5 units (www.coyotepoint.com). Radware makes them, Barracuda, Cisco, Kemp, Foundry, Zeus, and the list goes on and on....

Do you have any specific needs that can help narrow down between manufacturers?

Pretty much just HTTP/HTTPS load balancing. Its basically an apache server that runs on linux and pulls information from a db server behind it.

 

[ccbadd]

Originally posted by: spidey07
ccbadd - that doesn't look like a load balancer at all. A load balancer balances applications and services and includes robust means of controlling stickiness be it via a cookie or many other options. I don't see anything in there the probes applications on real servers to make sure the application is up and operational and available to receive content requests?

Sorry, I guess I should pay a little closer attention.

 

[drebo]

Barracuda Networks also offers an application load balancer with SSL offload. I've never used it, but my experience with other Barracuda products has been relatively good. They'll also send you one to try for 30 days.

 

[theanimala]

My vote for F5, best out there.

 

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer

Originally posted by: Jamsan

Originally posted by: spidey07
ccbadd - that doesn't look like a load balancer at all. A load balancer balances applications and services and includes robust means of controlling stickiness be it via a cookie or many other options. I don't see anything in there the probes applications on real servers to make sure the application is up and operational and available to receive content requests?

The originally post didn't necessarily specify an application load balancer. Radware and Cisco both offer WAN/Routing load balancing, so the confusion can easily have been made..

There are tons of options for app load balancing out there.. What's your budget look like? A pair of F5 3600's will easily set you back close to 50k. Coyote makes decent units and are considerably less than F5 units (www.coyotepoint.com). Radware makes them, Barracuda, Cisco, Kemp, Foundry, Zeus, and the list goes on and on....

Do you have any specific needs that can help narrow down between manufacturers?

Pretty much just HTTP/HTTPS load balancing. Its basically an apache server that runs on linux and pulls information from a db server behind it.

I run haproxy to proxy between an apache front end an application cluster hosting ruby on rails code.

Are you trying to load balance between multiple apache front ends? If so you can just setup haproxy to load balance between them. It's fairly configurable with heartbeat checking and auto dropping of bad servers plus failover support... best part it's free.. but you still need the hardware to run it.