How does IronPort assist in load balancing?

[Chandan Visweswara]

There are plans to put a load balancer in front of an IronPort cluster of 6. As of now, we have Mx record priority (Round robin) based load balancing.

Does an ESA has the intelligence to automatically reject incoming connections if other ESAs in the cluster is idol? Or, in other way, does ESA has the intelligence to reject incoming connections if it sees a series of connection attempts from the same source? Or, does it have intelligence to reject incoming connections if it is devoid of any resource to process any new messages?

Thanks,

Chandan

[Robert Sherwin]

No.  The ESA will still act in the same stand alone fashion - so, it will act independently with the traffic that is presented.  Other appliances in cluster would not recognize the other appliance's traffic or status for handling mail that is processed --- remember, with the ESA, in cluster - the only thing that is shared is the configuration between cluster appliances.

The traffic handling and load balancing aspect would be based on the 3rd party software/appliance sitting in front of the appliances --- then control the pool of appliances that you have set from there.

I hope this helps!

-Robert

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