Load Balancing

The load balancing feature distributes user requests for web pages and other protected applications across multiple servers that all host (or mirror) the same content. You use load balancing primarily to manage user requests to heavily used applications, preventing poor performance and outages and ensuring that users can access your protected applications. Load balancing also provides fault tolerance; when one server that hosts a protected application becomes unavailable, the feature distributes user requests to the other servers that host the same application.

You can configure the load balancing feature to:

• Distribute all requests for a specific protected website, application, or resource between two or more identically configured servers.
• Use any of several different algorithms to determine which server should receive each incoming user request, basing the decision on different factors, such as which server has the fewest current user connections or which server has the lightest load.

The load balancing feature is a core feature of the NetScaler appliance. Most users first set up a working basic configuration and then customize various settings, including persistence for connections. In addition, you can configure features for protecting the configuration against failure, managing client traffic, managing and monitoring servers, and managing a large scale deployment.