Quoting James Baldwin <jbaldwin@antinode.net>:

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.

I'd add the NetScaler (www.netscaler.com) to your list, especially for webservers. It has been very stable for us and the support we've received from them has been top-notch. They've really been working on expanding their support for other protocols. The F5 is probably my favorite box to work on, the CLI and the UI are both fantastic. Their platform is super-flexible and intuitive for unix people. The GUI is NOT java and is very easy to work with. Their support has not been as responsive as we get from NetScaler or Foundry, but they eventually get things solved. We used to have Cisco CSS 11800's in our environment... but after wrangling them for over a year of intermittent outages with no solution from Cisco (other than "Please upgrade to yet another $250k solution.") we started the search for another platform. Cisco's support is such that we're removing them from our network entirely (pending budget, time and practicality.) Tine Hutchison

On 8 Jun 2004, at 19:32, James Baldwin 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.

Depending on the nature of your content and how you want your load distributed, the approach we take with distributing DNS load (udp and tcp) across a cluster of nameservers may be of interest: http://www.isc.org/pubs/tn/isc-tn-2004-1.html http://www.isc.org/pubs/tn/isc-tn-2004-1.txt No bells and whistles here, but also no need to buy load-balancing appliances. Be sure to read section 6 ("Limitations"). Joe