Latest
Multi-AZ resilience: Why the recent AWS outage shows you need it
Don't wait for the next outage to expose gaps in your critical architecture.
Insights from the load balancer experts
F5 / Citrix / Kemp
How to set up and manage an F5 in the ADC Portal
As an F5 engineer, they asked me to test the product and share my honest thoughts...
F5 / Citrix / Kemp
How to connect and manage a Citrix NetScaler in the Loadbalancer ADC Portal
As a NetScaler specialist, they asked me to test the product and share my honest thoughts...
How-tos
How to master SSL termination in HAProxy: considerations and configurations
SSL/TLS termination is the most regularly implemented kind of SSL/TLS offload...
Open source
SSL offload testing with HAProxy and Stunnel
There are a lot of SSL offload throughput statistics available for appliances across the internet but rarely do they detail the way they were tested...
HAProxy
3 ways to send HAProxy health check email alerts: Configuration how-to
The ideal way to monitor the health of the real servers is to to have a dedicated monitoring system in place such as Nagios. However this isn’t always an option, so for some they require the loadbalancer to send an alert...
HAProxy
HAProxy load balancer feedback agent — We've Open Sourced both our Windows and Linux versions for you!
In general when you are load balancing a cluster you can evenly spread the connections through the cluster. However, with some applications, you might get very high load from just a few users doing heavy work, which can compromise performance...
Performance
What do you mean my pipe is saturated?
Some of the most common questions we get at Loadbalancer.org are performance related. It is quite difficult to give a straight answer to these questions as the real answer is often slightly unsatisfactory...
Performance
Look, why can't you just tell me how many people are connected to the load balancer?
I must confess, at certain times it has looked like open warfare would break out between the support team and development team at Loadbalancer.org over the last few months...
Microsoft
Microsoft drops support for mstshash RDP cookies? (embrace and destroy policy?)
We are pretty sure Microsoft have quietly fixed this bug and not told anyone... But the story is quite fun so lets leave it here for a lesson in corporate stupidity..
High Availability
Exchange 2013 - Microsoft finally have an email solution designed for high availability and load balancing
In Exchange Server 2013, there are two basic building blocks – the Client Access Array and the Database Availability Group (DAG)...
HAProxy
HAProxy email alerts guide
As of haproxy-1.6-dev1 it is now possible to send email alerts directly from HAProxy thanks to the excellent work done for us by Simon Horman...
HAProxy
Setting up HAProxy with Transparent Mode on Centos 6.x
Transparent mode with HAProxy allows you to see the IP Address of the clients computer while still having a high availability service using HAProxy...
Application Management
Load Balancing Exchange 2010 CAS Array with HAProxy (Quick Guide)
This Blog is for anyone wanting to load balance the Exchange 2010 CAS role using only open source software...
High Availability
Simple bare metal restore of your load balancer with a USB stick
Does it seem like some appliance vendors go out of their way to make hardware recovery and licencing as difficult as possible?..
Security
Secure Your Web Servers: SSL Termination and BEAST
The BEAST attack is a practical attack based on a protocol vulnerability and mainly affects the client side...
Security
For any poor sod who needs to deal with the PCI Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
Any engineer dealing with PCI DSS compliance issues probably looses a little bit of the joy in life...
Print
Load balancing Microsoft Print Server
Microsoft Print Server provides a great way to share printers throughout your organisation, but when the print server falls over, the phone quickly starts to ring...
How-tos
NTLM authenticating proxy check script
This script was designed primarily to be tied into Ldirectord but feel free to adapt it to your needs, and if you do make changes dont be a stranger post your adaptations below!..
HAProxy
Load Balancer performance: Benchmarking HAProxy on EC2 (Quick and Dirty Style)
I get quite frustrated with benchmarks because they are very hard to perform properly, and even when you do them properly its very hard to get any useful data from them...
Application Management
Apache and X-Forwarded-For Header: How to log XFF using Apache
There’s been a lot of debate here in the office about how best to capture both your Loadbalancer’s IP and the Source IP of the user in your access_log in Apache 2.4. This is the tried and tested method we've come up with...
How-tos
IIS and X-Forwarded-For Header (XFF)
Although it's not technically a standard, the X-Forwarded-For (XFF) header is incredibly useful if you have any kind of proxy in front of your web servers...
GSLB
Why does Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) suck?
OK, Before the flames start let me state the usual caveat, "GSLBs don't ALWAYS suck. Just most of the time"...
Performance
G-Zip Compression and Load Balancing
A couple of customers asked if our appliances would do G-Zip compression. In the past we hadn't given it much thought until someone offered us a card to test it!..
Performance
EC2 load balancer appliance rocks, and its FREE... for now anyway.
I’m excited and slightly scared by our latest product! Excited because I've become slightly addicted to launching multiple instances in different parts of the world and load balancing the traffic seamlessly. Scared because this could change our whole business model...
How-tos
How to enable SNAT in LVS (xt_ipvs) and iptables
The vast majority of layer 4 load balancers use LVS in two-arm NAT mode...
HAProxy
Load balancing Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) with HAProxy
Here at Loadbalancer.org we have recently started the certification process of our product with Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS)...
Open source
Load balancing Windows Terminal Server — HAProxy and RDP Cookies or Microsoft Connection Broker
When you have users depending on Windows Terminal Services for their main desktop, it's a good idea to have more than one Terminal Server. RDP, however, is not an easy protocol to load balance...