Foundry Server Iron Server Load Balancer (SLB)

 I have recently had the pleasure of working with a few of the server irons that ev1 deploys as load balancers within the private racks and in the process of setting them up noticed the lack of easy to read documentation. The foundry website is full of great information but it takes a lot of reading and most of it is targeted at the telnet prompt and not the web interface. I have written this guide targeted at doing an initial setup of the slb as well as some more the more advanced configuration that clients may need. If you have purchased a load balancer inside of a private rack you will be dealing with the same hardware that this guide is targeted towards.

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Why use a foundry server iron load balancer

So what exactly is a server load balancer (SLB) and how is it going to help you?

An SLB is a rather expensive, but very effective, way to minimize downtime on an important website that requires 0 downtime. The load balancer that I have the most experience with is the foundry serveriron load balancer that ev1servers currently offers. The primary gain from a load balancer is the ability to host one, or a small group, of websites easily on multiple servers without having to rely on unbalanced solutions like round robin (RR) dns. The load balancer is configured so that each website has a single incoming IP and then when traffic hits the load balancer it will send it to which ever server has the least amount of connections. In this way if for some reason a server starts to slow down and the connections queue up it will stop sending them.

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