Load
balancing is a technique used to distribute workloads uniformly across
servers or other compute resources to optimize network efficiency,
reliability and capacity.
Load
balancing is performed by an appliance -- either physical or virtual --
that identifies in real time which server in a pool can best meet a
given client request, while ensuring heavy network traffic doesn't
unduly overwhelm a single server.
In
addition to maximizing network capacity and performance, load balancing
provides failover. If one server fails, a load balancer immediately
redirects its workloads to a backup server, thus mitigating the impact
on end users.
