Help with Load balancing Technology

[pmajumder]

Hi,

We have a need to load balance access from our Mainframe to a couple of Windows Server based applications. We must be able to do the load balancing based on both IP address and TCP port. The number of requests from the mainframe is approximately 10,000/day based on both IP address and TCP port.

Our current environment consists of 6509's at the core, distribution, and server farm layer. (All are running IOS).

Given this can can someone please give me some guidance/pointers as to what devices/modules/technology I should be looking at.

Thank you for your help

Pradeep

[Gilles Dufour]

your requirement is not very clear but if you need to do loadbalancing and already have cat6k, the obvious solution would be to install a content switching module [csm].

Gilles.

[pmajumder]

Giles,

Thanks for getting back to me. Just to clarify, the mainframe application (its business critical) makes a call to another application running on a Windows 2003 server. To provide high availability we will be adding a second windows 2003 server running the same application. What I would like to do is provide load balancing from the mainframe based on TCP port.

The CSM is an expensive solution. IOS SLB (included as part of the IOS on c6509) requires the client and server to be on separate subnets. Are there other solutions that would provide L4 load-balancing capabilities.

Thanks

Pradeep

[pgolding]

Pradeep,

The other option is to use CSS load balancers. But as Gilles suggested, you have the Cat6's now, so you may be better off staying with Cat modules. CSM and CSS provide hardware accelaration, where the IOS SLB does not, plus it has far less functionality.

Regards, Peter

[pmajumder]

Thank you both. Do you know if there are any documents available that will compare these options based on feature/capabilities?

Thanks

Pradeep

[pgolding]

Pradeep,

There is a data sheet for CSM located here -

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/hw/modules/ps2706/products_data_sheet09186a00800887f3.html

and for the CSS here -

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/partner/products/hw/contnetw/ps792/products_data_sheet0900aecd800f851e.html

IOS SLB is not documented as a seperate product, the best place to find information is in the new features section of IOS release notes.

Regards, Peter