Latest
How to set up and manage an F5 in the ADC Portal
As an F5 engineer, they asked me to test the product and share my honest thoughts.
Insights from the load balancer experts
Storage
Load balancing Weka is no longer optional — the new normal is 100X faster
Within the space of a few years our customers are demanding increases in performance and capacity — not just 10X, but 100X!..
Healthcare
Help! Our legacy modalities are awesome — but they don't understand DNS!
Connecting remote sites to central data centers necessitates GSLB. But implementation for legacy modalities isn't straightforward...
GSLB
Complete guide to DNS load balancing: Choosing the right method for your applications
DNS is a naming convention that translates human-readable web addresses into IP-addresses, and vice versa...
High Availability
Exchange 2013 - Microsoft finally have an email solution designed for high availability and load balancing
In Exchange Server 2013, there are two basic building blocks – the Client Access Array and the Database Availability Group (DAG)...
HAProxy
HAProxy email alerts guide
As of haproxy-1.6-dev1 it is now possible to send email alerts directly from HAProxy thanks to the excellent work done for us by Simon Horman...
HAProxy
Setting up HAProxy with Transparent Mode on Centos 6.x
Transparent mode with HAProxy allows you to see the IP Address of the clients computer while still having a high availability service using HAProxy...
Application Management
Load Balancing Exchange 2010 CAS Array with HAProxy (Quick Guide)
This Blog is for anyone wanting to load balance the Exchange 2010 CAS role using only open source software...
High Availability
Simple bare metal restore of your load balancer with a USB stick
Does it seem like some appliance vendors go out of their way to make hardware recovery and licencing as difficult as possible?..
Security
Secure Your Web Servers: SSL Termination and BEAST
The BEAST attack is a practical attack based on a protocol vulnerability and mainly affects the client side...
WAF
For any poor sod who needs to deal with the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
Any engineer dealing with PCI DSS compliance issues probably looses a little bit of the joy in life...
Print
Load balancing Microsoft Print Server
Microsoft Print Server provides a great way to share printers throughout your organisation, but when the print server falls over, the phone quickly starts to ring...
How-tos
NTLM authenticating proxy check script
This script was designed primarily to be tied into Ldirectord but feel free to adapt it to your needs, and if you do make changes dont be a stranger post your adaptations below!..
HAProxy
Load Balancer performance: Benchmarking HAProxy on EC2 (Quick and Dirty Style)
I get quite frustrated with benchmarks because they are very hard to perform properly, and even when you do them properly its very hard to get any useful data from them...
Application Management
Apache and X-Forwarded-For Header: How to log XFF using Apache
There’s been a lot of debate here in the office about how best to capture both your Loadbalancer’s IP and the Source IP of the user in your access_log in Apache 2.4. This is the tried and tested method we've come up with...
How-tos
IIS and X-Forwarded-For Header (XFF)
Although it's not technically a standard, the X-Forwarded-For (XFF) header is incredibly useful if you have any kind of proxy in front of your web servers...
GSLB
Why does Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) suck?
OK, Before the flames start let me state the usual caveat, "GSLBs don't ALWAYS suck. Just most of the time"...
Performance
G-Zip Compression and Load Balancing
A couple of customers asked if our appliances would do G-Zip compression. In the past we hadn't given it much thought until someone offered us a card to test it!..
Performance
EC2 load balancer appliance rocks, and its FREE... for now anyway.
I’m excited and slightly scared by our latest product! Excited because I've become slightly addicted to launching multiple instances in different parts of the world and load balancing the traffic seamlessly. Scared because this could change our whole business model...
How-tos
How to enable SNAT in LVS (xt_ipvs) and iptables
The vast majority of layer 4 load balancers use LVS in two-arm NAT mode...
HAProxy
Load balancing Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) with HAProxy
Here at Loadbalancer.org we have recently started the certification process of our product with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS)...
Open source
Load balancing Windows Terminal Server — HAProxy and RDP Cookies or Microsoft Connection Broker
When you have users depending on Windows Terminal Services for their main desktop, it's a good idea to have more than one Terminal Server. RDP, however, is not an easy protocol to load balance...
HAProxy
Transparent proxy of SSL traffic using Pound to HAProxy backend patch and how-to
I've previously blogged about how to get TPROXY and HAProxy working nicely together, but what if you want to terminate SSL traffic on the load balancer to use HAProxy to insert cookies in the standard HTTP stream to the backend servers?..
High Availability
Loadbalancer.org guarantee 99.999% (5 nines) up-time to all of our customers.
Some vendors make a fair bit of hype about their products enabling 99.999% availability out of the box...
HAProxy
Configure HAProxy with TPROXY kernel for full transparent proxy
If you use HAProxy as the load balancer then all of the backend servers see the traffic coming from the IP address of the load balancer...
How-tos
LVS Local node patch for Linux 2.6.25, Centos 5 kernel build how-to
Standard Kernel builds of LVS (Linux Virtual Server) don't have the ability to load balance traffic that is from the local node...
Direct Server Return
Load balancing via Direct Routing has several key advantages over NAT based methods
One of the (many) traditional problems with load balancing is the requirement to change your infrastructure in order to implement a hardware load balancer...
Direct Server Return
Direct Routing aka. Direct Server Return — How to solve the ARP problem on Windows Server 2022
Direct Routing aka. Direct Server Return (DSR) aka. N-Path is a great load balancing method. And it is, without doubt, the fastest method possible...