Using Self-Load-Balancing Clusters

In a development or production environment, you can designate that all server instances in a cluster participate in both redirecting and servicing requests, without using any dedicated load balancing instances. This is a self-load-balancing cluster, in which the target and the LB target are the same cluster.

A front-end hardware IP sprayer distributes request evenly across all instances in the cluster. If you do not use a hardware IP sprayer, a request can be forwarded to any server instance in the cluster. The converged load balancer component on that instance ensures that requests are distributed across the cluster. However, that instance is a single point of failure. The presence of a hardware IP sprayer ensures high availability.