What is Load Balancing?

What is Load Balancing? Many methods are used today to improve performance, response time and avoidance of DoS attacks. Too many requests, spurious or otherwise, can overload a device and cause damaging downtime. Just a few minutes of downtime can cause significant loss of revenue for a business.

Network load balancing methods are used to distributed the workload across multiple computers and devices, and ultimately different servers in a cluster. System administrators can build clusters of servers, each of which is load balanced with incoming client requests. In such way, all users get served faster.

Each server is basically running a duplicate of an application that you wish to provide to the targeted user. A virtual network adapter is created on each host so that the whole cluster is recognized as a single entity by the computer. However, the whole cluster of servers, i.e. whichever can handle the request fastest, will answer the client request. In such way, overloading of a single server is avoided.

Advantages of Utilising Network Load Balancing

– You can provide content-intensive applications to the client.

– Intelligent usage of processing power – service requests are directed to the least busy servers.

– Highest performance is achieved and users are provided with answers to their requests in the fastest response time.

– Downtime recovery. You can easily readjust any functions of the cluster, and redistribute service to different servers in the cluster, in a different geographical location.