Building a business case for CSM or CSS

[jdedon]

I have an immediate need for a hardware load balancing solution. This I can solve easily, but I have planned future needs that will require qreater functionality. Here is the scoop. I have immediate need to load balance Citrix NFUSE servers. Can they be load balanced above layer 2-3. I have serveral different web servers (currently load balanced using windows NLB). I have several ssl certificates. I would like to use ssl offload and maybe combine all the certificates into one and then use content switch to decide which web server owns the content.

I have future web applications that will use 3 tier model and use Biztalk in the backend. This platform may scale out very large horizontally. The future platform is a few years out but I would like to put as much justification in up front so all options are considered.

One other thing that makes for justification is the ability to split the load balancer up into logical/or physical segments so as to share with other divisions, development,QA etc.

Please comment

[Gilles Dufour]

regarding the selection of the servers based on the content requested, the current CSM is limited to match only 6 - 10 host name while the CSS has no limitation except the size of the config.

The only protocol that can be loadbalanced based on content - so layer 5-7 is HTTP and RTSP.

IF your citrix application makes use of these protocols, you can do L5/7 content rules.

My favorite between CSS and CSM is the CSM because of its ability to link a vserver/content rule to a vlan and because there is no such thing as garbage collection which is annoying on the CSS with long lasting flows.

Regards,

Gilles.