What's the best way to load balance multiple protocols on one vserver?

[ecollege]

Hi,

We have a CSM blade on a 6513, in bridge mode. I'm just wondering what is the best way to serve HTTP and HTTPS (or any two or more ports) from the same group of servers. As I see it, we have two options:

1. Don't set a port on the vserver, so it is load balancing "any" or "tcp". This is easy but I want to be sure there isn't a downside to this, other than the obvious security issue.

2. Create multiple vservers and point them at the same serverfarm. I tried this and I got some odd results with the health checks.

Any ideas? Thanks a lot.

[Gilles Dufour]

you listed the only 2 options available.

The advantage of solution #2 is that you can apply specific config for each protocol ie: for HTTP you can turn 'persistent rebalance' if needed.

If you want to use specific probes [not icmp], it is also a good practice to create a different serverfarm for each protocol.

Like this, if the HTTP service goes down but not the server, you can still have other protocols loadbalanced.

Regards,

Gilles.

Thanks for rating this answer.