RE: LoadBalancing products: Foundry ServerIron
A friend of mine was using LD's on his service. They do about 180mbps over 3 locations and were running performance problems. (They ended up moving to F5's). One of Exodus's Senior Network Engineers has seen that consistenly become problematic at about the magic 80mbps you mentioned. I spoke with a few different neteng buddies when we started looking at LB's over a year ago and they all told me to stay away from the LD's. But like all of us, they get better as they stay around longer... Probably, it's the same with all LB products ... you have to match the right products with your needs. Me, I have to go for the big scale. So I'll sacrifice features for ability to consistently handle the traffic and scalability. I eliminated quite a few simply because they couldn't handle the volume, but that doesn't mean that they would work well for a site located in one of the big data centers. -Karyn -----Original Message----- From: Bennett Todd [mailto:bet@rahul.net] Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2000 9:25 AM To: Karyn Ulriksen Cc: 'nanog@merit.edu' Subject: Re: LoadBalancing products: Foundry ServerIron 2000-07-06-11:56:34 Karyn Ulriksen:
How about Local Director?
Everyone I've spoke to about LD is very unhappy with it's performance.
That can only be because you didn't speak to me:-). Seriously, I've used them a fair bit, and like 'em a lot. Their H-A failover is superb, they load balance really gracefully, their hold-time feature (making assignments sticky) works well with simple website designs for session tracking; and I really love the way they passively monitor the performance of all servers in the farm and consistently route traffic to the currently fastest server. I've heard that they max out around 80Mbps. That was a year or so ago, I've no idea if that's still the case. I've never hit their limits. But I can believe that a faster-but-dumber load balancer would have a higher ceiling. -Bennett
So I think we're in complete agreement, even though we have opposite things to say about the box. For bandwidths up to say 50-60 Mbps they work beautifully. If you want to go faster, you probably have to sacrifice some of the smarts they bring to the job. But while I certainly understand that circumstances will vary, from my own experience I wouldn't try and scale a single load-balancer up past say 50Mbps sustained capacity; I'd scale up from there by deploying diverse server farms, plugged into substantially different parts of the internet. How many places are there where you can really usefully push more than 50Mbps into one point of the internet without it just swelling up into a big blister and popping? I realize that there are probably plenty of private backbones that would have no trouble distributing that sort o' bandwidth, but I've had bad luck with peering points; whenever I see bad performance from one of my server farms it seems like the real problem has ended up being where the provider's backbone hooks up to other providers'. Then again, that may just mean that I've been stuck using poorer providers. -Bennett
If you are using a LocalDirector with a Cat6k switch, you can enable the Accelerated Server Load Balancing feature. This allows the Cat6k to forward the bulk of the flow (at wire speed), and lets the LD focus exclusively on the connection setup/teardown functions. For more information: http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/iaabu/localdir/ld33rns/l dicgd/ld3_ch04.htm#xtocid1675521 S | | Stephen Sprunk, K5SSS, CCIE #3723 :|: :|: Network Design Consultant, HCOE :|||: :|||: 14875 Landmark Blvd #400; Dallas, TX .:|||||||:..:|||||||:. Email: ssprunk@cisco.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Karyn Ulriksen" <kulriksen@publichost.com> To: "'Bennett Todd'" <bet@rahul.net>; "Karyn Ulriksen" <kulriksen@publichost.com> Cc: <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2000 11:40 Subject: RE: LoadBalancing products: Foundry ServerIron
A friend of mine was using LD's on his service. They do about 180mbps
3 locations and were running performance problems. (They ended up moving to F5's). One of Exodus's Senior Network Engineers has seen that consistenly become problematic at about the magic 80mbps you mentioned. I spoke with a few different neteng buddies when we started looking at LB's over a year ago and they all told me to stay away from the LD's. But like all of us,
over they
get better as they stay around longer...
Probably, it's the same with all LB products ... you have to match the right products with your needs. Me, I have to go for the big scale. So I'll sacrifice features for ability to consistently handle the traffic and scalability. I eliminated quite a few simply because they couldn't handle the volume, but that doesn't mean that they would work well for a site located in one of the big data centers.
-Karyn
Stephen Sprunk: Friday, July 07, 2000 5:46 PM
If you are using a LocalDirector with a Cat6k switch, you can enable the Accelerated Server Load Balancing feature. This allows the Cat6k to forward the bulk of the flow (at wire speed), and lets the LD focus exclusively on the connection setup/teardown functions.
For more information: http://www.cisco.com/univercd/cc/td/doc/product/iaabu/localdir /ld33rns/l dicgd/ld3_ch04.htm#xtocid1675521
S
| | Stephen Sprunk, K5SSS, CCIE #3723 :|: :|: Network Design Consultant, HCOE :|||: :|||: 14875 Landmark Blvd #400; Dallas, TX .:|||||||:..:|||||||:. Email: ssprunk@cisco.com
----- Original Message ----- From: "Karyn Ulriksen" <kulriksen@publichost.com> To: "'Bennett Todd'" <bet@rahul.net>; "Karyn Ulriksen" <kulriksen@publichost.com> Cc: <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Thursday, July 06, 2000 11:40 Subject: RE: LoadBalancing products: Foundry ServerIron
A friend of mine was using LD's on his service. They do
about 180mbps over
3 locations and were running performance problems. (They ended up moving to F5's). One of Exodus's Senior Network Engineers has seen
I heard rumor that Cisco was considering including LD capability in the 6509 MSN router module? that
become problematic at about the magic 80mbps you mentioned. I spoke with a few different neteng buddies when we started looking at LB's over a year ago and they all told me to stay away from the LD's. But like all of us,
get better as they stay around longer...
Probably, it's the same with all LB products ... you have to match the right products with your needs. Me, I have to go for the big scale. So I'll sacrifice features for ability to consistently handle the
consistenly they traffic and
scalability. I eliminated quite a few simply because they couldn't handle the volume, but that doesn't mean that they would work well for a site located in one of the big data centers.
-Karyn
On Sat, Jul 08, 2000 at 07:33:36AM -0700, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
I heard rumor that Cisco was considering including LD capability in the 6509 MSN router module?
Dunno, but I'm pretty sure it's already supported in newer MSFC code... -adam
participants (5)
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Adam Rothschild -
Bennett Todd -
Karyn Ulriksen -
Roeland M.J. Meyer -
Stephen Sprunk