Load Balancing Introduction

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. The web sites load balancer needs to distribute these hits across multiple backend servers in order to process the requests in a reasonable amount of time. If only one server handled all the incoming requests most of us would have given up on the internet by now due to how slow it would be! There are two main types of load balancing:

• software load balancing
• hardware load balancing

With software load balancing the software accepts the incoming connections and distributes them across multiple servers. The Apache Web Server is a typical example of a software load balancer. It accepts web requests and shares them across multiple backend servers.

With hardware load balancing a hardware device such as a switch does the load balancing. This is faster than using software. The two main types of hardware load balancing are:

• server load balancing, and
• switch load balancing

Which type of load balancing you use depends on the requiremetns of your system.