Load Balancing Solutions
Challenge
Whether your deployment consists of a complex solution that performs custom processing on packets of data as they move between your frontend and backend applications, or a simple solution that provides a single point of access to multiple directories, you will always seek out ways to improve performance and leverage your existing architecture to provide the maximum benefit.
It is not uncommon to have an environment that comprises of more than one LDAP directory with consistent data. This replication may be performed for redundancy or performance reasons, but the replication does not automatically handle the load balancing or failover of your application or client requests.
By implementing middleware software, you can take full advantage of your replication strategy to greatly improve overall performance by load balancing requests to your backend servers.
Solution
Whenever a high throughput of LDAP read operations is desired, load balancing can be used to utilize a pool of servers. The actual queries are distributed over multiple servers in the pool, according to one of several algorithms available. Symlabs LDAP Proxy can load-balance by distributing load evenly, or by using a weighted algorithm that distributes load according to pre-defined characteristics.
Symlabs Virtual
Directory Server also has extensive support for load balancing on a
per-operation basis, dramatically increasing performance in replicated
environments. Its load balancing is different than that provided by
typical TCP/IP Level 3 load balancing appliances. Instead of balancing
connections over multiple servers, Symlabs Virtual Directory Server
balances individual requests over different connection pools to
different replicas, providing finer-grained load balancing.
Connection-based load balancing does not take into consideration that
different connections may have completely different load patterns. Symlabs
Virtual Directory Server supports multiple load balancing algorithms,
including weighted algorithms, giving the administrator full control
over load distribution to different servers.
Symlabs LDAP Proxy and Virtual Directory Server can analyze queries and then route those to a server that is best suited to handle a particular request. This is very useful when queries require a special index to be carried out efficiently. It can detect this and route those requests to the servers where that index is defined.
Load Balancing and advanced routing functionality is directly available within the products and will work out of the box with minimal configuration required.