[c-nsp] SLB on 6500s

[Jee Kay]

We're currently evaluating a number of low-end (up to 100mbps)
hardware SLB solutions, and I'm looking into the Cisco equivalents.

We're going to be load balancing various types of traffic, so
essentially whatever SLB we end up with it will be used as a pure TCP
proxy.

My question is about stateful failover scenarios. Our contractual
obligations require us to not have more than 50% of our sessions
disconnect in the event of a network device failure. This means that
any sort of active/passive scenario won't work for us unless the two
components are able to do rapid stateful failover in the event of a
failure.

>From what I can gather from the limited Cisco SLB documentation (this
is non-CSS documentation, mind) is that intra-chassis (ie Sup failure)
can be done statefully, but there is precious little information
available about whether inter-chassis (ie chassis failure) failover
can be done statefully.

Has anyone else done anything like this and have any tips? Might the
introduction of a CSS into the equation help out at all?

If the 6500s can't do this (active/active or active/passive with
stateful failover), are there any other solutions people have found
that work well in this scenario?


Thanks in advance,
Ras