A load balancer is a device that acts as a reverse proxy and distributes network or application traffic across a number of

servers.

they improve the overall performance of applications by decreasing the burden on servers associated with managing
and maintaining application and network sessions, as well as by performing application-specific tasks.

Load balancers are generally grouped into two categories: Layer 4 and Layer 7. Layer 4 load balancers act upon data
found in network and transport layer protocols (IP, TCP, FTP, UDP). Layer 7 load balancers distribute requests based
upon data found in application layer protocols such as HTTP.

Requests are received by both types of load balancers and they are distributed to a particular server based on a
configured algorithm. Some industry standard algorithms are:

Round robin

Weighted round robin

Least connections

Least response time

Layer 7 load balancers can further distribute requests based on application specific data such as HTTP headers, cookies,
or data within the application message itself, such as the value of a specific parameter.

SSL offloading relieves a Web server of the processing burden of encrypting and/or decrypting traffic sent via SSL

The processing is offloaded to a separate device designed specifically to performSSL acceleration or SSL termination.

Node or server

host: server/application

Member: node/server/application/ip address with port number

Health monitoring(by ping, service pint, scripts) is based upon the service insted of server.

a cluster—is almost always made up of services,

virtual server usually includes the application port was well as the IP address.

Not to Load Balance:

Persistance:it is extremely important that multiple connections from the same user go to the same back-end service
host and not be load balanced. This concept is called persistence, or server affinity.

Connection maintenance

If the user is trying to utilize a long-lived TCP connection (telnet, FTP, and more) that doesn't immediately close, the load
balancer must ensure that multiple data packets carried across that connection do not get load balanced to other
available service hosts.
The basic load balancing transaction is as follows:

The client attempts to connect with the service on the load balancer.

The load balancer accepts the connection, and after deciding which host should receive the connection, changes the
destination IP (and possibly port) to match the service of the selected host (note that the source IP of the client is not
touched).

The host accepts the connection and responds back to the original source, the client, via its default route, the load
balancer.

The load balancer intercepts the return packet from the host and now changes the source IP (and possible port) to
match the virtual server IP and port, and forwards the packet back to the client.

The client receives the return packet, believing that it came from the virtual server, and continues the process.