Load Balancing Theory

Load balancing also referred to as load sharing gives the network the ability to use the bandwidth which is available on links which would have been only used in the event of the primary link failing.

Another use of Load balancing is much faster convergence since there are multiple routes in the routing table with the same prefix, in actual fact the convergence time in testing has been shown to be essentially instant.

Read more about EIGRP

I found this post on a good site for technical information. It does not reference layer 7 content switching but is a good quick overview of load balancing using Microsoft Load Balancing Services (WLBS) read more on WLBS

This post explains what is meant by layer 7 load balancing and an example of content switching using HTTP URL parsing is given later in the post. In the OSI model layer 7 is the applications layer and there are a number of application protocoals that are used this layer: Read more about layer 7 load balancing

Before looking at Load Balancing Switches we will first look at what we mean by load balancing. The basic idea with load balancing is to share incoming connections across multiple hardware devices. So for example a web site may receive many thousands of hits an hour. Read more about Load Balancing