A full-featured load balancer is a required part of any highly available and fault tolerant environment. Load balancers are not an OpenEdge product, so finding the correct load balancer with the needed features is crucial. Load balancing in PAS for OpenEdge is accomplished through industry-standard HTTP options.

You can use Progress Kemp LoadMaster to load balance PAS for OpenEdge in your environment. For more information, see Progress Kemp LoadMaster load balancing.

This content provides additional load balancing options for PAS for OpenEdge. It includes an overview of configuration tasks for each option, and where applicable, describes the pros and cons of the option.

There are several load balancer features that can be used with PAS for OpenEdge:
  • Forwarding client requests to multiple PAS for OpenEdge instances
    • Allows you to spread workload over several instances
    • Allows you to quickly recover from an instance crash by spinning up a new VM or machine to automatically register with the load balancer
    • Allows you to upgrade the application without interruption with the following workflow:
      • Create a new PAS for OpenEdge instance with new code
      • Add it to the load balancer
      • Remove the old PAS for OpenEdge instance with old code
  • Load balancer health check
    • Allows the load balancer to verify the health of a PAS for OpenEdge instance
    • Removes any instance that fails the health check
    • Use the OpenEdge HealthScanner can remove an instance before it fails
  • AutoScaling load balanced PAS for OpenEdge instances
    • Allows you to scale up and down instances based on load (or other measure). For example:
      • Run the smallest size instance for low peak times
      • Scale up multiple instances to cover peak times
      • Scale down again after peak times

There are many more third-party load balancing products available. The load balancing options covered in this content have been tested with the latest OpenEdge release.