Load Balancing 
As online companies and businesses grow there comes a point where it becomes necessary to rethink the design of the server solution. There are several ways to accomplish this, from splitting the different applications onto separate servers, to upgrading hardware and adding additional machines. Whatever the design is, the goal is to focus on improvement in 3 areas:
• Increased Capacity
• Scalability
• Hi Availability/Redundancy
Features/Benefits
As previously stated, Load Balancing enables customers to design a highly effective and highly scalable solution which focuses on the following areas:
- Increased Capacity – Using a “least-sessions” algorithm, requests are distributed amongst multiple servers hosting the same application, allowing more users to reach your application.
- High Availability/Redundancy – Since servers are automatically removed from the farm when health checks fail, Load Balancing is an excellent product for customers seeking High Availability for HTTP, SSL, and FTP applications.
- Scalability - Servers can be easily inserted or removed from the server farm, allowing customers to react quickly and resize their web presence to match demand without costly server upgrades.
How it works
Load Balancing is a fairly simple process:
- A Virtual IP is assigned to the application to be load balanced.
- Requests to this VIP address are processed at the Foundry Server Irons, where it checks for the availability of the ‘real’ IPs on the servers.
- Requests are then distributed amongst the available servers. Servers that do not respond to a health-check do not receive any traffic.
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