load-balancing inbound sftp connections with ACE

[nyr.hakeem-habeeb]

Hi,

Can anyone share experiences or any info relating to issues that might be encountered when load-balancing sftp protocol?

The goal is to distribute inbound file deposits evenly across SFTP servers.

High-level Overview

Clients -> Internet -> Tier-1 Firewall -> ACE Load-balancer -> SFTP Servers

Many Thanks

[Syed Iftekhar Ahmed]

SFTP is nothing but SSH. It uses a single connection. There are no issues loadbalancing it using traditional Layer 4 load balancing.

So you are good.

On the other hand FTP over SSL (FTPS) can neither offloaded nor loadbalanced using ACE.

FTPS uses multiple channels and Since the control channel is encrypted, ACe is not able to get the port numbers for the data connections.

HTH

Syed Iftekhar Ahmed