Overview: Load Balancer v5.0
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Load Balancer is an administration and configuration tool that
provides dynamic load balancing, scalability, and high availability for
servers on the Internet or on your Intranet.
Highlights of Version 5.0 include:
- Support for new versions of Linux
New versions of Red Hat and SuSE will be supported in the release along with the addition of
SuSE SLES.
- 64 bit Support for AIX and Solaris
For AIX 5.1 and Solaris 8 only, support has been extended to 64-bit mode in addition to support of
32-bit mode.
- Enhancement to the Cisco CSS Controller component
The Cisco CSS switch is a hardware based load balancer with an SNMP interface for fetching
connection information and setting weights. The Cisco CSS Controller (formerly known as Cisco
Consultant) is a Load Balancer component which monitors servers being load balanced by the
Cisco CSS switch and provides appropriate weights to ensure accurate load balancing. The controller
enhances the server load-balancing function of the Cisco CSS switch with greater application and
system awareness.
- Nortel Alteon Controller component
This feature is a new component for Load Balancer.
The Nortel Alteon Controller is very similar to the Cisco CSS Controller delivered in the
previous release. The Nortel Alteon Web switch is a hardware based load balancer with an SNMP interface
for fetching connection information and setting weights. The Nortel Alteon Controller is a
new Load Balancer component which monitors servers being load balanced by the Alteon switch
and provides appropriate weights to ensure accurate load balancing. The controller enhances
the server load-balancing function of the Nortel Alteon switch with greater application and
system awareness.
- Controller high availability
This feature applies to the Cisco CSS Controller and Nortel Alteon Controller components.
Load Balancer now supports high availability for both the Cisco CSS Controller component
and the Nortel Alteon Controller component. With this feature the customer can install, for example, Cisco CSS
Controller in a backup server to take over load balancing functions if the primary server fails.
- Load Balancing WebSphere Application Servers (WAS)
This feature applies to the CBR component.
CBR now supports load balancing Web application requests to WAS (version 5) servers using the
WAS form of affinity. CBR has the ability to automatically map the WAS HTTP plugin configuration
file to a CBR configuration file in order to perform load balancing of your WAS configurations.
- Connections per second rule enhancement
This feature applies to the Dispatcher and CBR components.
The enhancement to the connections per second rule allows the customer to specify the "upserversonrule"
option on the connections per second rule. By specifying this option, you can ensure that the
remaining servers will not be overloaded if one or more servers in the server set goes down.
- CBR active cookie affinity enhancement
This feature applies to the CBR component.
The previous implementation of CBR active cookie affinity based client connections to a server
on the cluster and port of the request. This can become a problem in configurations where there
are multiple rules with different server sets. The enhancement will allow for multiple affinities
within a single cluster and port, allowing a client to maintain affinity with potentially many
different servers based on the context of the request.
- New "heavyweight" HTTPS Advisor
This feature applies to the Dispatcher, CBR, and Site Selector components.
In addition to the "lightweight" SSL advisor, support for a "heavyweight" HTTPS advisor
has been added. The HTTPS advisor opens full SSL connections which establishes a full SSL socket
with the server. (In contrast, the lightweight SSL advisor does not establish a full SSL socket
with the server.)
- Linux SNMP support
This feature applies to the Dispatcher component.
Load Balancer now provides SNMP support on Linux platforms. (SNMP support is available
on all other platforms supported by Load Balancer.)
- Remote Web based administration support
This feature applies to all the components of Load Balancer.
Load Balancer now supports Remote Web-based administration in addition to remote administration
via RMI (remote method invocation).
- Support for command line access from the GUI
This feature applies to all the components of Load Balancer.
A command line ("Send command") can now be accessed from the Host node in the GUI tree.
- New problem determination tool (lbpd)
This feature applies to the Dispatcher component.
For Load Balancer problem determination, a tool (lbpd) has been provided that will quickly
and easily gather important information which the customer can send to IBM service.
- Features removed from the Load Balancer offering
The following features have been removed from Load Balancer:
- Mailbox Locator component
- Server Directed Affinity (SDA)
The five major components of Load Balancer are:
- Dispatcher - provides load balancing for TCP and UDP applications.
Dispatcher balances the load on servers within a local area
network or wide area network using several weights and measurements
that are dynamically set.
New in v2.0, content-based routing (without Caching Proxy) is available on the Dispatcher
component to load balance incoming client requests, based on Web page content using specified rule
types, to HTTP servers.
- Content Based Routing (CBR) - works with Caching Proxy to load balance incoming
client requests, based on Web page content using specified rule types, to HTTP or HTTPS servers.
- Site Selector - balances the load on servers within a wide area
network (WAN) using measurements and weights that are gathered from the Metric Server component
running on those servers.
- Cisco CSS Controller - uses Load Balancer technology to provide
real-time load balancing information to the Cisco Content Services Switch.
- Nortel Alteon Controller - uses Load Balancer technology to provide
server weights dynamically to the Nortel Alteon family of Web switches.
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