• What is server load balancing?
• Does load balancing mean 100% service uptime?
• Who needs SLB?
• What load balancing hardware do you use?
• Can I supply my own SLB device?
• How many config changes can I request per month?
• Does the service allow me to scale my server farm?
• What is the difference between Primus' MSLB and Windows Load Balanced Sites?
• Is all traffic load balanced?
• What algorithm is used to distribute traffic across my servers?
• Is there a limit to the number of servers or services I can load balance at the same time?
• Will I still have direct access to a particular load balanced server?
• How much traffic can the load balancer handle?
• Do I need to have identical servers behind the load balancer?
• Does the load balancing work with SSL?
• Does Primus offer any other complementing managed service offerings?

Server load balancing is a technology which allows network traffic to be distributed across multiple physical servers in order to increase reliability, performance, and horizontal scalability of a server farm.

It allows you to use multiple smaller (and typically more cost effective) servers in your server farm instead of a single large server which would end up being a single point of failure.

Not necessarily. It's extremely difficult to achieve true 100% service availability, especially when your servers are connected to the Internet. If your goal is 100% availability, you will need to ensure that every aspect of your network and server infrastructure has redundancy built in. You will require redundant load balancing devices, redundant switches and routers, redundant firewalls, redundant application servers, redundant database servers, etc. Even after deploying a completely redundant infrastructure, you might still see downtime due to network attacks, hacker attacks, software bugs, hardware problems, etc.

If you have questions about deploying a highly-redundant infrastructure, Primus' Managed Services technicians can assist you with your design.

If you have more than one server providing the same services to end users, you should use SLB to distribute traffic to those servers.

Besides redistributing traffic in the event of a server failure, the SLB device can also allow you to gracefully take a server "out of service" for maintenance.

Adding additional servers is also very simple. Simply add the new servers to the SLB config and they will automatically added to the server pool.

Primus' MSLB service is provisioned using Cisco's proven, leading-edge, LocalDirector platform.

Yes you can supply your own SLB hardware. If the equipment is not a Cisco LocalDirector unit, then please confirm with Primus' sales staff that your equipment will be supported by our technical staff.

Each MSLB client will receive 2 free configuration changes per month. A nominal fee will apply for additional change requests in a month.

Yes, the MSLB service allows you to add additional servers to your server farm at anytime with no downtime to the server farm.

Microsoft's Windows 2000 Server OS's do provide a built-in rudimentary load balancing capability.

Primus' MSLB service is provisioned using a standalone hardware appliance.

Primus believes that the hardware-based solution is more scalable, better performing, and more reliable than the load balancing services built into the Windows OS.

The SLB device will only load balance the traffic types which you want to be load balanced. For example you could choose to load balance the web service (http), but not load balance the ssh or ftp services.

A number of algorithms are available, including round-robin, weighted distribution, and least-session. Primus generally recommends that customers use the "least session" algorithm for optimal performance.

No, you can load balance any number of services or servers. For example you could have 10 servers in your server farm all running HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, POP and SMTP and have all the services load balanced across all 10 servers.

Yes, each server consists of a real IP address as well as the virtual load balanced IP so you can directly reach any server through the load balancer.

The standard SLB appliance can handle over 90Mbps and 700,000 simultaneous connections, which is sufficient for all but the largest server farms. Larger hardware options are available for over 1 million connections and 400Mbps.

No, you can easily incorporate servers with different hardware specifications and even different operating system or software versions. For example you could have two web servers running Windows IIS and a third running Apache on Linux.

Yes, the SLB device allows you to maintain server persistence when dealing with SSL-based requests. This ensures the load balancer directs all browser requests to the same server in your server farm for the duration of the session.

Yes, Primus offers the following managed services: Managed Firewall Service, Managed VPN Service, Managed System Administration, Managed Monitoring Service and Managed Dedicated Servers.