Load-Balancing Policies

Load balancing improves performance of the scalable service, both in response time and in throughput.

There are two classes of scalable data services: pure and sticky. A pure service is one where any instance of it can respond to client requests. A sticky service is one where a client sends requests to the same instance. Those requests are not redirected to other instances.

A pure service uses a weighted load-balancing policy. Under this load-balancing policy, client requests are by default uniformly distributed over the server instances in the cluster. For example, in a three-node cluster, let us suppose that each node has the weight of 1. Each node will service 1/3 of the requests from any client on behalf of that service. Weights can be changed at any time by the administrator through the scrgadm(1M) command interface or through the SunPlex Manager GUI.

A sticky service has two flavors, ordinary sticky and wildcard sticky. Sticky services allow concurrent application-level sessions over multiple TCP connections to share in-state memory (application session state).

Ordinary sticky services permit a client to share state between multiple concurrent TCP connections. The client is said to be “sticky” with respect to that server instance listening on a single port. The client is guaranteed that all of his requests go to the same server instance, provided that instance remains up and accessible and the load balancing policy is not changed while the service is online.

For example, a web browser on the client connects to a shared IP address on port 80 using three different TCP connections, but the connections are exchanging cached session information between them at the service.

A generalization of a sticky policy extends to multiple scalable services exchanging session information behind the scenes at the same instance. When these services exchange session information behind the scenes at the same instance, the client is said to be “sticky” with respect to multiple server instances on the same node listening on different ports.

For example, a customer on an e-commerce site fills his shopping cart with items using ordinary HTTP on port 80, but switches to SSL on port 443 to send secure data in order to pay by credit card for the items in the cart.

Wildcard sticky services use dynamically assigned port numbers, but still expect client requests to go to the same node. The client is “sticky wildcard” over ports with respect to the same IP address.

A good example of this policy is passive mode FTP. A client connects to an FTP server on port 21 and is then informed by the server to connect back to a listener port server in the dynamic port range. All requests for this IP address are forwarded to the same node that the server informed the client through the control information.

Note that for each of these sticky policies the weighted load-balancing policy is in effect by default, thus, a client's initial request is directed to the instance dictated by the load balancer. After the client has established an affinity for the node where the instance is running, then future requests are directed to that instance as long as the node is accessible and the load balancing policy is not changed.

Additional details of the specific load balancing policies are discussed below.

• Weighted. The load is distributed among various nodes according to specified weight values. This policy is set using the LB_WEIGHTED value for the Load_balancing_weights property. If a weight for a node is not explicitly set, the weight for that node defaults to one.

  The weighted policy redirects a certain percentage of the traffic from clients to a particular node. Given X=weight and A=the total weights of all active nodes, an active node can expect approximately X/A of the total new connections to be directed to the active node, when the total number of connections is large enough. This policy does not address individual requests.

  Note that this policy is not round robin. A round-robin policy would always cause each request from a client to go to a different node: the first request to node 1, the second request to node 2, and so on.

• Sticky. In this policy, the set of ports is known at the time the application resources are configured. This policy is set using the LB_STICKY value for the Load_balancing_policy resource property.

• Sticky-wildcard. This policy is a superset of the ordinary “sticky” policy. For a scalable service identified by the IP address, ports are assigned by the server (and are not known in advance). The ports might change. This policy is set using the LB_STICKY_WILD value for the Load_balancing_policy resource property.