I have experience with F5 BigIP, Foundry, Cisco CSS, Nortel Alteon and the Inkra VSS. F5 is great for ease of use. It's built on BSD, so the CLI is exactly unix with special commands to manipulate the load balancing features. I think you can only used this box in routed-mode LB, but someone speak up if you can use it in bridged-mode. They have an iRule feature where you can filter and route traffic based on many parameter, such as various http headers. If you have a lot of layer 7 switching to do, you can configure it easily on the F5. Their support, however, needs work. I haven't called in a year, so it may have improved. The Foundry is very good at many sessions per second. I've used these mostly in DSR (direct server return) mode and have had good luck with them. For basic layer 4 switching they're very good. I've never used any layer 7 features on the Foundry. Foundry's documentation needs help, though. The Cisco Content Services Switch is ok, but overpriced. I don't care for the interface. I've never loaded this one up, so I'm not sure how it performs under heavly load. The Nortel Alteon is pretty good. I've seen some odd issues with the VMA architecture, but they're usually addressed in the latest patch. The cli takes a burn-in period, but once you know it you can fly on the box. Configuring layer 7 features can be cryptic, however. Use they're application guides for help. I've used the Alteon in routed-mode and bridged-mode load balancing. Lastly, the Inkra. I've been using the Inkra for a few years, but it's relatively new compared to the others listed above. They market it as a virtual services switch which means it not only does load balancing, but also firewall, ssl acceleration, ids/idp, etc. We've seen big improvements in the past six months with load balancing performace due to the release of 2.0 code. I'm eagerly awaiting their 3.0 due out in mid summer. NOTE: I may be biased since the company I work for has been helping Inkra develop and test it for several years. You may want to join the list lb-l@vegan.net for more load balancing advice and help. Mike -----Original Message----- From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu]On Behalf Of Mike Lyon Sent: Wednesday, June 09, 2004 11:07 AM To: James Baldwin Cc: North American Network Operators Group Subject: Re: NLB Recommendations I have had nothing but good luck with Foundry's ServerIron. Very versatile. Cisco-like CLI. I have always had good support with Foundry's TAC too. -Mike On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 19:32:44 -0400, James Baldwin <jbaldwin@antinode.net> wrote:
I'm looking for recommendations for network load balancers. These, at this time, will primarily be used to attach to a cluster of webservers although I would like a solution which can be repurposed to other applications later. I am looking at F5's Big IP, Cisco's SLB, and Foundry's ServerIron at this time.