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You successfully enabled load balancing in a rule. Connecting this rule between network and tool ports causes
the traffic to be balanced across the tool ports.
Understanding the load balancing process
When load balancing is active, traffic becomes more evenly distributed to monitoring tools. This ensures the
monitoring tools are not overwhelmed, and network visibility can be improved.
Load balancing has different meanings in networking. The definition of load balancing can differ depending on
the network device. In the Matrix, load balancing refers to forwarding network port traffic as evenly as possible
to tool ports. The network traffic, measured by volume of network conversations or packets, is distributed as
evenly as possible to tool ports connected to the rule.
Use load balancing when you have limited or no visibility to a faster network interface. Consider this scenario:
your organization has a 10 Gb network link, but your analysis tools only have 1 Gb interfaces. Until the
analysis
tools
are upgraded, you have limited visibility into the network. One solution can be to use load balancing. For
example, a 10 Gb network link that is consistently utilized at 30% or less could be load balanced to three 1 Gb
tool ports. Load balancing can play an important role in giving your organization the network visibility that a
restrictive budget or other factor prohibits.
Always try dedicating enough tool ports to balance the traffic without dropping packets. Try dedicating a
sufficient number of tool ports when load balancing; the exact number depends on many factors. You risk
dropped packets (tool port oversubscription) without enough tool ports in a load balancing setup. Load
balancing can still be used with an insufficient number of tool ports, but you might need to enforce
packet
trimming (page 43)
or
filtering (page 23)
to lower the utilization enough so that packets do not drop.
Load balancing does not provide any type of redundancy or failover for your connected tools. Although you
could design a layout
to replicate traffic (page 32)
and
forward it to multiple tool ports (page
17), a vital step
in creating a simple redundancy strategy, load balancing is not designed to complement this goal. Replication
(meaning load balancing is disabled) is a better choice when many tools need identical data. Load balancing
guarantees that the load-balanced traffic forwarded to tools is never identical streams.
Load balancing does not interact with applications to achieve results. The purpose of load balancing is for
taking traffic and distributing it more evenly to the analysis tools connected to tool ports. The Matrix is designed
to perform load balancing without
agent software
or other potential points of failure. With the exception of
packet trailers and recalculated CRC values after trimming (both disabled by default), the Matrix does not modify
packets.
Load balancing should complement the analysis goals of connected tools. When load balancing, care should
be taken to ensure tools receive the correct traffic for their intended purpose. For example, a monitoring tool
that inspects header fields or specific strings in payload might benefit from
packet-based load balancing (page
38).This tool could fulfill its intended purpose simply by observing individual packets. Conversely, a protocol
analyzer or performance management tool may need to receive full conversations using
conversation load
balancing (page 37)
to reconstruct data streams, measure VoIP quality, and more.
Understanding the load balancing process | 39
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