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Load balancers are highly recommended in ECS deployments to evenly distribute data loads across all service nodes. Although customers are responsible for implementing and configuring their deployed load balancers, Dell does provide recommendations and suggestions about how to configure some of them with ECS workflows. Load-balancing needs should be examined at the workflow level. Each workflow might justify or rule out the use of load balancers. Use of load balancing is important for Atmos traffic, generally recommended for S3, and can be used with NFS. Load balancers are not required for CAS because CAS workflows have load balancing built into the client applications.
Both local and global load balancers are recommended where workflows justify their need. In addition to distributing the load across ECS nodes, a load balancer provides high availability (HA) for the ECS cluster by routing traffic to healthy nodes. For each workflow that uses a load balancer, record each load balancer's IP address and Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) in planning documents.
For multisite deployments, consider when load balancing should be implemented to provide a method to balance writes across sites to take advantage of the ECS XOR data reduction capability. For example, in a three-site deployment using an archive, if the application is performing writes in only one site, ECS will not take advantage of its XOR capabilities despite having all three VDCs in a replication group. This can be corrected by using a load balancer to redirect traffic and balance writes across sites.
Several white papers are available that provide information about how to implement a load balancer with ECS:
Load balancing best practices |
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