 |
|
| Recent
Articles |
Oracle E-Business Suite's New SysAdmin Features
Fear not System Administrators: There are exciting new system administration features in the pipeline for managing e-Business Suite environments. Well, I've made it back home to Charlotte and I'm getting caught up with my notes from Open World. One of the sessions I attended last week was by Oracle Senior Project...
Another Old SCO Box
The last time I saw a SCO 3.2v4.2 system was the summer of 2004, but another peeked out of the bushes this week.This was at a hotel; apparently formerly a Bass Hotel but now owned by another firm. Their system printer stopped working, they brought someone in to look at it, he worked at it with a printer repair person...
Results In For Survey On Network Outsourcing
The results of the latest IDC WAN Manager Survey indicated something of a mixed outlook for enterprise network outsourcing services and providers. The former may enjoy "robust growth" in the coming months; the latter could "face challenges." According to ID...
Multicasting And The RPF Check
Multicasting is a vital topic on your BCMSN, CCNP, and CCIE exams, and it can also be very confusing when you first start studying it. Multicasting uses concepts that are unlike anything you´ve run into in your routing protocol studies, and that can throw you at first. I speak rom experience that multicasting is like any other...
Troubleshooting Direct Serial Connections
A prime topic of your CCNA and CCNP CIT exams will be connecting Cisco routers directly via their Serial interfaces, and while the configuration is straightforward, there are some vital details and show commands you must know in order to pass the exams and configure this successfully in production and home lab networks.
|
|
12.14.06
Hardware Load Balancing Lightens Server Load
 By
Mark Henry
Load balancing is the even distribution of computer processing and communication activities so that a server is not overwhelmed. Load balancing is especially important for networks where it is difficult to predict the number of requests that will be issued to a server.
Busy Web sites typically employ two or more Web servers in a load-balancing scheme. If one server starts to get swamped, requests are forwarded to another server with more capacity. Load balancing is therefore a service that is employed on more sophisticated site deployments.
Most service providers that offer managed hosting will provide load balancing services to their clients if they experience constantly heavy traffic on their Web sites. Multiplexing traffic amongst several servers permits better site availability. Load balancing therefore distributes traffic efficiently among network servers so that no individual server is overburdened.
In the early days of the technology, many load balancing solutions where implemented through customized domain name server configurations. This approach called "DNS round robin," rotated incoming requests from Web browsers to multiple Web servers. The result was that all requests to the particular Web site were evenly distributed among all of the machines in the cluster.
The advantage of this system was that it was inexpensive, as a system administrator only needed to make a few changes in order to implement it. Its major disadvantages however was that DNS round robin did not support server affinity or high availability.
Server affinity is a load-balancing system's ability to manage a user's requests, either to a specific server or any server, depending on whether session information is maintained on the server or at an underlying, database level. Without server affinity, DNS round robin could not by itself exercise control over incoming traffic without the aid of cookies, hidden fields or URL rewriting.
Due to its very nature of not being able to exercise this type of control, DNS round robin could not natively handle browser caching, since incoming requests were randomized. DNS round robin also had tremendous difficulties dealing with high availability, since the DNS system requires a large amount of time of propagate information and cache it throughout the network. As a result, DNS round robin is a more antiquated approach toward managing server load. Load balancing, however, is much more sophisticated today, because it is mainly implemented through appliances such as smart switches.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Mark Henry is the author related to Load Balancer, Dual Port Router, Multiple Gateways, Server Load Balancing Xrio provide solutions for bandwidth management, load balancing, link bonding, server load balancing.
|
