Multi-site Load Balancing Definition
Multi-site Load Balancing distributes traffic across servers located in multiple sites or locations around the world to facilitate disaster recovery and business continuity.
What Is Multi-Site Load Balancing?
Multi-site load balancing, also known as global server load balancing (GSLB), distributes traffic across servers located in multiple sites or locations around the world. The servers can be on-premises or hosted in a public or private cloud.
Multi-site load balancing is important for quick disaster recovery and business continuity after a disaster in one location renders a server inoperable. GSLB multi-site load balancing automatically diverts requests away from the failed server to servers in other locations not affected by the failure.
How Does Multi-Site Load Balancing Work?
Multi-site load balancing preserves data and business continuity when there is a sudden server failure or service disruption. Multi-site load balancing redirects traffic to the nearest server not affected by the failure. The automatic application traffic management is based on predefined policies. This load balancing solution provides seamless failover and failback without the need for manual intervention, which results in a lower mean time to recovery (MTTR).
Does VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Offer Multi-Site Load Balancing?
Yes. VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer delivers global server load balancing (GSLB), also known as multi-site load balancing, for enterprise customers as part of the software load balancing capabilities of VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer. This capability includes:
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- • Active / Standby data center traffic distribution
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- • Active / Active data center traffic distribution
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- • Geolocation database and location mapping
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- • Data center persistence
- • Rich visibility and metrics for all transactions
VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer’s software load balancer is intent-based. It delivers elasticity and intelligence across every cloud and can be managed from a single, centralized controller
For more on the actual implementation of load balancers, check out our Application Delivery How-To Videos.
For more information on multi-site load balancing see the following resources: