Firewall Load Balance; How Load Balancer Works - Fortinet FortiGate Series Administration Manual

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Firewall Load Balance

FortiGate Version 4.0 MR1 Administration Guide

01-410-89802-20090903

http://docs.fortinet.com/

Use the FortiGate load balancing function to intercept the incoming traffic and share it

across the available servers. By doing so, the FortiGate unit enables multiple servers to

respond as if they were a single device or server. This in turn means that more

simultaneous requests can be handled.

There are additional benefits to server load balancing. Firstly, because the load is

distributed across multiple servers, the service being provided can be highly available. If

one of the servers breaks down, the load can still be handled by the other servers.

Secondly, this increases scalability. If the load increases substantially, more servers can

be added behind the FortiGate unit in order to cope with the increased load.

This section describes:

How load balancer works

Configuring virtual servers

Configuring real servers

Configuring health check monitors

Monitoring the servers

You can configure virtual servers on the FortiGate unit (load balancer) and bind them to a

cluster of real servers. Up to 8 real servers can be bound to 1 virtual server. The topology

of cluster is transparent to end users, and the users interact with the system as if it were

only a single virtual server. The real servers may be interconnected by high-speed LAN or

by geographically dispersed WAN. The FortiGate unit schedules requests to the different

servers and makes parallel services of the cluster to appear as a virtual service on a

single IP address.

Figure 265: Virtual server and real servers setup

Internet/Intranet

(Virtual Server/Load Balancer)

How load balancer works