Network Load Balancing

Network Load Balancing is a service provided by OU IT to enhance the security, manageability, and reliability of university network services. If you have a service on an internal network that needs to be widely accessible, clients can connect to a Virtual IP (VIP) created on the load-balancer and have their traffic distributed across one or many of your servers. This offers some measure of added security by preventing your servers from being directly exposed to the internet, and offers additional benefits such as SSL offloading (where certificates and encryption are managed on the load-balancer itself) and health monitoring (where the load-balancer tracks service health and directs traffic to healthy servers).
OU IT recommends that all public-facing network services, including web services, reside behind the F5 for added security and ease of TLS certificate management.

Features

• Load-balancing: TCP, HTTP/S, LDAP/S, SMTP, and other protocols can be load-balanced according to a variety of algorithms.
• Health checks: When multiple servers are in use, the load-balancer can monitor service health and only direct traffic to healthy servers.
• SSL Offload: SSL certificates can be installed on the load-balancer, which will then handle session encryption.
• HTTPS redirect: The load-balancer can handle re-directing traffic from HTTP to HTTPS.
• Persistence: Clients can be persistently directed to the same back-end servers by tracking cookies or source addresses.