Re: Experience with Open Source load balancers?

[William Cooper <wcooper02 () gmail com>]

S/W vs H/W is really a question rooted in performance and feature
needs vs cost... weigh your options carefully.

On Mon, May 16, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Welch, Bryan <Bryan.Welch () arrisi com> wrote:
> Greetings all.
>
> I've been tasked with comparing the use of open source load balancing software against commercially available off the 
> shelf hardware such as F5, which is what we currently use.  We use the load balancers for traditional load balancing, 
> full proxy for http/ssl traffic, ssl termination and certificate management, ssl and http header manipulation, nat, 
> high availability of the physical hardware and stateful failover of the tcp sessions.  These units will be placed at 
> the customer prem supporting our applications and services and we'll need to support them accordingly.
>
> Now my "knee jerk" reaction to this is that it's a really bad idea.  It is the heart and soul of our data center 
> network after all.  However, once I started to think about it I realized that I hadn't had any real experience with 
> this solution beyond tinkering with it at home and reading about it in years past.
>
> Can anyone offer any operational insight and real world experiences with these solutions?
>
> TIA, replies off list are welcomed.
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Bryan