Load Balancing Theory

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