Load Balancer Best Practices

Multiple subnets are used for data, service, and management VLANs.

• The data VLAN is where the VIPs will reside.

• The service VLAN is the VLAN on which traffic flows from the Load Balancer to the server.

• The management VLAN is one on which servers are load balanced.

To support the path failover configuration, the Control Center allocates Virtual IPs (VIP) on multiple subnets. The Control Center displays connections between the ports and multiple subnets. This functionality enables you to use both load balancer ports and show separation between the data VLAN and the management VLAN.

The Load Balancer management interface must be on a subnet on which one of the server interfaces resides (the management subnet). This subnet should be on a separate VLAN than the Data VLAN or the Service VLAN.

You can perform more extensive configurations directly on the device. After you perform these manual configurations, you can use the snapshot mechanism to capture the configuration. Refer to the section Creating an Account Image By Using Snapshot and How To Snapshot Load Balancer for more details.

Multiple load balancers are needed only when the load balancers are connected to multiple subnets. A common use of multiple load balancers would be to balance web traffic to web server and then balance database traffic to database servers. Each VLAN is indicated by a different wire color.

A load balancer can only balance the server. A load balancer cannot balance a subnet, external subnet, or ethernet port.