load balancing and load sharing

[piotrkrol]

Hi

What are differences between load balancing and load sharing on Cisco MPLS router with BGP?

Howto check kind of balancing using CLI?

[paolo bevilacqua]

Different terms, same thing.

[sean_evershed]

See below a link to defining the two concepts:

http://www.nil.com/ipcorner/LoadBalancingBGP/

[piotrkrol]

Do I understand correctly?

According to:  http://www.nil.com/ipcorner/LoadBalancingBGP/

1.) Load Sharing is not the same like Load Balancing:

Load sharing is the ability to distribute outgoing traffic (or influence the flow of incoming traffic) over multiple paths.

Load balancing is the ability to split the load toward the same destination (host or IP prefix) over multiple paths.

2.) There are 3 kind of Load Balancing in BGP network:

1.) Per-host load balancing
2.) Per-port load balancing
3.) Per-packet load balancing

3.) BGP self cannot Load Balancing, but it can Load Sharing.

4.) Load Balancing  is for example over CEF (Cisco Express Forwarding) possible.

[Richard Burts]

The link that Sean posted is very interesting and I am glad that he introduced it into the discussion.

I find that different people have different definitions of these terms, and frequently we need to be careful in discussion to be sure that we are using a common definition in that discussion. Ivan does make a distinction in definition of these terms. In his view load sharing is distributing traffic (especially outbound traffic but could also apply to inbound traffic) over multiple paths and load balancing is distributing traffic to the same destination over multiple paths. These are very servicable definitions, though in my experience this is not the most common definition.

I find that many people would agree with Paolo that we have two terms which essentially refer to the same thing, distributing traffic over multiple paths.

And I find that some people do make a distinction between the terms and use load sharing to mean distributing traffic over multiple paths (where paths may have different amounts of load) and use load balancing to mean distributing traffic over multiple paths in a way that produces the same amount of traffic on each path.

I can not say that any one of these definitions are any more "correct" than the other. I can only say that it is important in having a discussion that all participants in the discussion have a common understanding of how the terms are used in that discussion.

HTH

Rick

[bava_ccna]

I agree with Rick!!