load balancing

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

As per previous posts Load balancing can either be hardware or software based. In the Cisco world software based load balancing is handled by IOS SLB! That’s a bit of a mouthful, so lets list out a few definitions to make it clear:

IOS stands for Internetwork Operating System and consists of a combination of switching, internetworking and telecommunications functions all of which are integrated within a multitasking operating system, and

SLB stands for Server Load Balancing and is used to balance load (packets) across multiple servers

Read more about Cisco Load Balancers