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
    • Spreads the workload over several instances
    • Quickly recover from an instance crash by starting a new VM or machine to automatically register with the load balancer
    • Upgrade the application without interruption with the following workflow:
      • Create a new PAS for OpenEdge instance with new code.
      • Add the instance to the load balancer.
      • Remove the old PAS for OpenEdge instance with old code.
  • Load balancer health check
    • Verify the health of a PAS for OpenEdge instance.
    • Remove any instance that fails the health check.
    • Remove an instance before it fails with the OpenEdge HealthScanner.
  • Auto Scaling load balanced PAS for OpenEdge instances
    • Scale up and down instances based on load (or other measure), for example:
      • Run the smallest size instance at non-peak times.
      • Scale up multiple instances to cover peak times.
      • Scale down again after peak times.

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