Load Balancing Protocols and Methods
Load balancing allows you to distribute incoming traffic between several servers to increase fault tolerance and request processing speed. With FortiGate, you can configure load balancing between servers in your Selectel infrastructure.
When configuring load balancing, you select:
- protocol of incoming traffic;
- load balancing method.
Depending on which protocol you select, you can enable session persistence.
Protocols
Protocols at different levels of the OSI model are available for load balancing:
- network and transport layers (L3–L4): IP, TCP, and UDP;
- application layer (L7): HTTP, HTTPS, IMAPS, POP3S, SMTPS, and SSL.
Session Persistence
During load balancing, you can enable session persistence. All requests from a single user will be processed by a single server. This allows preserving the user session, for example, without interrupting authentication on the website. Session persistence is not supported for all protocols. The session persistence method depends on the protocol.
Load Balancing Methods
The balancing method determines how requests are distributed between servers behind the firewall.