[f-nsp] Centralized Load balancing via 802.1q?

[Tine Hutchison]

I'm not a ServerIron expert and I must be missing something here.

If you're using the ServerIron's in routing mode, I'm not sure why you can't do
exactly what you're talking about.  Just put the ServerIron into the L3 path,
either directly above the customer and the 802.1q VLAN (the SI would be the
default g/w) or with a router in the middle.

Same thing with bridging mode.  You just have to make sure to put the SI in the
layer 2 path.

So... what am I missing here?

Tine

Quoting Matt Stockdale <mstockda at logicworks.net>:

> Greetings-
>
>   We're currently using a number of pairs of ServerIron XL's on separate
> subnets/vlans to offer load balancing services for multiple customers.
> Most of these devices are sorely underutilized, and taking up valuable
> datacenter space.
>
>  We had visited the issue w/ foundry a couple of years ago, ideally
> wanting to trunk up a central pair of devices via 802.1q trunk to our
> core switches, and use that to provide "virtual serverirons" on any vlan
> we needed.  It turns out we couldn't do that at the time, and despite
> what their product manager told me at CeBit, it still can't.
>
>  It looks like source-ip and source-nat are about as close as we can
> come, but our customers are unwilling to lose the true source ip of the
> incoming connections for log analysis purposes. I believe this is
> because the serverirons are primarily layer2 devices, no?
>
>  In addition, the foundry folks seem to have lost our support contract
> (that we renewed 2 weeks ago) and seem unwilling or unable to give us a
> straight answer on this. It's astonishing, really, how hard they are
> working to not take our money. Oh well.
>
>  All of that said (thanks for reading this far), is anyone aware of a
> foundry product that can do what we're looking for? Failing that, anyone
> else's product?
>
> Thanks,
>   Matt
>
>
>
> --
> -----------------------
>     Matt Stockdale
>   Sr Network Engineer
> mstockda at logicworks.net
>
>