With LoadMaster clustering, the load-balancing capability can be extended as needed by adding additional LoadMasters for the same Virtual Service. Traffic which is intended for a failed node is either passed on to an existing node or load-balanced across the remaining nodes.

The LoadMasters all work in parallel. If a LoadMaster node fails, traffic is redistributed amongst the remaining nodes. Health checking is performed on each of the LoadMasters.

Most administrative changes should be made on the shared IP address interface. These changes are then propagated to the LoadMasters in less than a second. Local administration of the individual LoadMasters can also be performed by accessing the WUI of the units directly. The WUI of the local LoadMasters contains limited configuration options.

How it Works

When traffic is forwarded to the cluster, the admin node uses source-based persistency to pass the connections among the child nodes. When the child node receives the packet, it processes the requests on the Virtual Services and sends those requests to the back-end Real Servers. Once the response is received from back-end Real Servers, the child node forwards the received response directly back to the client. This is done to efficiently allow for resource pooling of all nodes in the cluster. For this reason, you cannot configure transparency.