CLAW load balance

[karl.jones]

Hi

I have a 7505 with two CIP cards in and a 4port token ring card (amongst other things). The 7505 will have 2 escon connections to the mainframe.

I wish to implement CLAW load balancing across the 2 CIP cards, although the clients will use one IP address to access the mainframe. Is this possible with CLAW or should I consider another method.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Regards

[dmccullo]

Hi Karl,

Sure, there are several ways to do this. It's likely that you want to use a virtual IP address (VIPA), and run a routing daemon (OSPF or RIP) on the mainframe. With that in place you can use equal cost routing to take advantage of the multiple paths. The mainframe stack also allows you to do the same for outbound traffic. The usual recommendation is to use per-flow/session allocation rather than per-packet for traffic in both directions.

For more functionality, things like server health probing, deep packet inspection, various session allocation algorithims, geographic balancing, etc you can add the appropriate load balancing technology.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/contnetw/index.html

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/modules/ps2706/ps780/index.html

There is also a Cisco load balancing solution designed primarily for the mainframe, as shown in this IBM Redbook.

http://publib-b.boulder.ibm.com/Redbooks.nsf/RedpieceAbstracts/sg246297.html

Rgds, Dan