Specifications

8 Barracuda Load Balancer Administrator’s Guide
Overview
Organizations use load balancers to distribute traffic across a set of servers in their network. In the
event a server goes down, the load balancer automatically detects this failure and begins forwarding
traffic to the remaining functioning servers, maintaining high availability of the services provided by
the servers. The Barracuda Load Balancer is designed to help organizations achieve their high
availability objectives by providing:
• Comprehensive failover capabilities in case of server failure
• Distribution of traffic across multiple servers
• Integrated protection from network intrusions
The Barracuda Load Balancer enables you to set conditions that dictate how traffic should be
distributed to your Real Servers. For example, you can specify that a new connection should be
processed by the Real Server with the lowest CPU load.
The Barracuda Load Balancer also makes it easy to scale your network to handle increased traffic
because you can simply add a Real Server at any time, and the Barracuda system will automatically
detect the new server and add it to the load-balanced farm of servers.
Powerful Enterprise-Class Solution
The Barracuda Load Balancer uses a variety of factors to make load-balancing decisions. It is
designed to provide comprehensive IP load-balancing capabilities to any IP-based application,
including:
• Internet sites with high traffic requirements, including Web, FTP, media streaming, and content
delivery networks
• Hosted applications using thin-client architectures, such as Windows® Terminal Services
• Other IP services requiring optimal performance, including SMTP, DNS, RADIUS, and TFTP
The Barracuda Load Balancer's integrated Service Monitor ensures that servers and their associated
applications are operational. In the event of server or application failure, the Barracuda Load Balancer
facilitates automatic failover among servers to ensure continuous availability. The Barracuda Load
Balancer also assists in orchestrating scheduled maintenance windows on specific servers while
maintaining application availability through other servers in the server farm.
To minimize the risk associated with failures of the load balancers themselves, two Barracuda Load
Balancers can be deployed in an active/passive configuration. In the event a primary active Barracuda
Load Balancer fails, a backup Barracuda Load Balancer can quickly assume the identity of the
primary Barracuda Load Balancer. The switchover happens automatically to maintain application
availability.
Note
The Barracuda Load Balancer is not designed for link balancing that distributes traffic across
multiple Internet connections.