A department requiring server load balancing (SLB) or server failover capability will be provided with a dedicated A10 Thunder server load balancer partition at any of the sites providing the service. All SLB sites are configured to be high availability services and departments wishing to be site independent can leverage the global server load balancing (GSLB) features built into the SLB service.. If located in the same physical site a SLB partition can be placed on the same network as the hosts to be balanced, can be given a new subnet to use for dedicated services, or it can be placed in parallel with the bSecure firewall service, with one connection to an outside VLAN and one on the server VLAN, with an existing firewall service to support more complex requirements to provide higher performance than passing all traffic thought the firewall.
The SLB partitions are configured as a layer 3 device allowing full content proxy and network address translation (NAT).
At all sites, the appliances will be set up in a redundant configuration, with two SLB appliances linked through two switches with redundant connectivity to the campus network and are dedicated to providing network services. The SLB are configured such that a change made on one is automatically propagated to the other. If one of the appliances fails, the other will take over automatically.
IST will manage hardware and software upgrades, and will create the initial configuration for a departmental SLB partition. Department administrators will be responsible for managing their individual instances.
Three SLB sites are available for department use:
- Earl Warren Data Center
- San Diego Super Computer Co-location Facility
- Campus (not available for local server connections but supports routed connections and gslb)