Hi again. There has been some time since I wrote about Loadbalancing. So here we go.
The world has changed due to Covid-19 situation. Most of us who are working, well we work from home, here by shorted as #WFH, or just WFH.
This gives IT operations lot's of things to think about. Services need to be up and running all the time. There are lot's on employees that is working from home use VPN services, and out this way on companies internet connections.
And this is where the "boring" component is make it's way to your system as a Loadbalancer. If you are running Exchange Onprem, you might need to have two Exchange servers. then you need to have a Loadbalancer for this, so that you load the traffic between the servers.
If you are still running Skype for Business Onprem, well you need Loadbalancer if you run enterprise pool. My advice to you all, do not run DNS Loadbalancing.
DNS Loadbalancing vs Hardware LoadBalancing
In eg. Skype for Business Enterprise where DNS LBA has been used we often see that failover takes time. I have asked earlier in some tech forums about this and what the failover time is. But never got an answer for it. Well it can be from 20 seconds to 2 minutes. Think about this, if one server in the pool goes down and the users will be disconnected for 2 minutes. I think they will start to call helpdesk and helpdesk will be jammed.
When using a hardware Loadbalancer like KEMP, F5 or Netscaler, well downtime is not a question. If a server goes down well the the HLB will move it instant to the next server who has capacity for the traffic.
This meens also that you can for some systems do management or maintenance during day time so the user will not notice any thing.
What will work for me?
The LBA can be used as:
- Virtual appliance
- Hardware unit
- WM in Azure, AWS or where you are homed
This is almost your call and how you would like use it in your datacenter.
But a LBA is not just LBA, they have more functions that can be used or integrated.
It can integrate as a:
- Reverse proxy
- WEB Application Firewall
- Always ON (vpn)
- SSO, integrated with DUO and other MFA plattforms
So with a Loadmaster you will get more and secure functions for your organization and this is important now that we all WFH (work from home).
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