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Load balance traffic on a NetScaler appliance

May 2, 2023

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The load balancing feature distributes client requests across multiple servers to optimize resource utilization. In a real-world scenario with a limited number of servers providing service to a large number of clients, a server can become overloaded and degrade the performance of the server farm. A NetScaler appliance uses load balancing criteria to prevent bottlenecks by forwarding each client request to the server best suited to handle the request when it arrives.

To configure load balancing, you define a virtual server to proxy multiple servers in a server farm and balance the load among them.

When a client initiates a connection to the server, a virtual server terminates the client connection and initiates a new connection with the selected server, or reuses an existing connection with the server, to perform load balancing. The load balancing feature provides traffic management from Layer 4 (TCP and UDP) through Layer 7 (FTP, HTTP, and HTTPS).

The NetScaler appliance uses a number of algorithms, called load balancing methods, to determine how to distribute the load among the servers. The default load balancing method is the Least Connections method.

A typical load balancing deployment consists of the entities described in the following figure.

Figure 1. Load Balancing Architecture

The entities function as follows:

Virtual server. An entity that is represented by an IP address, a port, and a protocol. The virtual server IP address (VIP) is usually a public IP address. The client sends connection requests to this IP address. The virtual server represents a bank of servers.
Service. A logical representation of a server or an application running on a server. Identifies the server’s IP address, a port, and a protocol. The services are bound to the virtual servers.
Server object. An entity that is represented by an IP address. The server object is created when you create a service. The IP address of the service is taken as the name of the server object. You can also create a server object and then create services by using the server object.
Monitor. An entity that tracks the health of the services. The appliance periodically probes the servers using the monitor bound to each service. If a server does not respond within a specified response timeout, and the specified number of probes fails, the service is marked DOWN. The appliance then performs load balancing among the remaining services.

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Load balance traffic on a NetScaler appliance

May 2, 2023

Contributed by:

May 2, 2023

Contributed by:

Load balance traffic on a NetScaler appliance

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