any suggestion for web server load balancing appliances

[ref]

On Thu, 2009-08-20 at 06:54 -0700, Dave Peters wrote:

> All,
> 
> We have 5 linux web servers and hosting 900 site and looking for load balancing appliances.
> 
> Any suggestion? Has anyone using Radware AppDirector?
> 

I I highly recommend F5's bigIP. It is a 2 x 1U dual unit that can
handle all sorts of load balancing. We use it as a firewall, as a
network traffic balancer, as a traffic director, and to balance the load
to the 6 front end servers we have delivering a combined +50 million
page views a month. IT has a rather cool feature called 'one-connect'
where it makes a semi-permanent connection to your apache servers and
pipes all traffic through that connection. This reduces significantly
the overhead of opening and closing connections between the LB and the
apache server. We currently have ours set to refresh itself every 1000
connections, but that is just caution and a slight case of paranoia in
our part. 
The two units that make up the bigIP's solution are fully identical and
can be used as standalone units, but when joined together they hearbeat
monitor each other and complete redundancy in master/standby mode. 
The web-based https interface is really easy to get around in, and
syncing the boxes is very very simple.

The only drawback is price, new units are expensive, we paid close to
$40k for the pair, but I can see them on eBay right now for under $5k
for a pair, and I'm sure you can dig around and find an older model for
less.

Richard




> 
> Thank you.
> 
> Dave
> 
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