We are currently (still) using version 5 for serving up allications through an internet browser. We are proposing to go to version 7 in the new year and I am in the process of looking at a high level design. Our current environment uses an ICM outside a cluster to server to load balance the machines in the cluster. Just wondered if anyone has considered using Network Load Balancing rather than using an ICM?
At the moment ICM works ok (it’s reliable) but the operational teams don’t believe that it load balances all that well. Anyone have any thoughts or experience with this?
When we ran R5 we looked at ICM and found that it didn’t do what we wanted to do, so we opted for just round robin DNS. When we migrated to R6 & R7 we didn’t bother looking at ICM, we moved to Network Load Balancing on the router. This worked great, it appeared very reliable and managed load balancing and fail over well.
At the end of the day, it is all down to your envoronment, What would be involved for you to move from one set up (ICM) to another (NLB)
I just think that the router should be able to manage the work load and hits a lot better than an ICM
We used ICM in 5.08 and now the servers have been upgrade to 7.01. The ICM work great for us. We are handling some 78K http unique requests per week and the load balancing is working great. We are also looking into Cisco Load balancing device.