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server load balancing using a cisco

Hello,

i need some advice selecting cisco hardware for the place i work at. we need to load balance some high traffic high B/W apache web servers the servers are all identical and they do not use any type of sessions ( stateless ) so a user can go to a different server each request.

i was thinking about getting a cisco to do layer 2 or 3 load balancing,

my quesions are: can this be done at layer 2 or 3 ? what hardware do we need? it also needs to have some failover. how much B/W and concurrent connections can it do?

we wanted to go with a router instead of those hardware load balancers for scalability

i read about SLB in the cisco catalyst 6500, is this the best way to do this?

thanks.

Reply to
Elia Mazzawi
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Hi Elia,

You may find the WS-X6066-SLB-APC Data Sheet helpful:

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Brad Reese BradReese.Com Cisco Repair Service Experts

1293 Hendersonville Road, Suite 17 Asheville, North Carolina USA 28803 Toll Free: 877-549-2680 International: 828-277-7272 Website:
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Reply to
BradReeseCom

does the content switching module scale better than the ISO - SLB? why would some one get one rather than the other? i just know i'm going to be asked that if i say it can do it in 2 ways.

Reply to
Elia Mazzawi

There is also IOS SLB in Catalyst 6500. But this "requires" IOS SLB license fee.

"BradReeseCom" kirjoitti viestissä: snipped-for-privacy@g47g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...

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Reply to
Make

Hi Elia,

Here is advice from two CCIEs regarding IOS SLB vs. CSM on the Cisco

6500.

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IOS SLB is only intended for low volume load balancing with very limited functionality.

The two solutions are worlds apart from a performance perspective, and as you've read, the CSM has many more features (including HTTP probes for checking server availability).

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IOS SLB offers a L4-7 load balancing solution.

Be aware that as soon as you do L7 or do some nating, you will get poor performance with just IOS SLB compared to a CSM.

One advantage of IOS SLB is the capacity to do Radius load balancing [inspecting Radius packets to identify Framed IP, ...]

If you just need VPN or Firewall load balancing, IOS SLB is enough.

Should you need HTTP or any other traffic the CSM is a better choice.

Or you can combine both IOS SLB and CSM.

IOS SLB is used to load balance Radius and the CSM is used to load balance the rest of the traffic.

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Sincerely,

Brad Reese BradReese.Com Cisco Repair Worldwide

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Reply to
BradReeseCom

thanks brad Reese for your advice. you seem to know your Cisco's the catalyst 6500 seems like a beast of a router it has some impressive specs. I'm thinking that it may be overkill for our requirements. we have 100 apache servers, and we want it to scale to 200 or so. they use a combined B/W of 50MBits, and we want it to scale to

400MBits. and we want them to load balance of off 2 ip's and be fault tolerant. is there a smaller cisco we could use or is the catalyst 6500 our only choice? or maybe i can be pointed to another non Cisco direction.
Reply to
Elia Mazzawi

we ended up using catalyst 3750's

Reply to
Elia Mazzawi

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