cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Load Balancing: What are my options?

Former Member
0 Kudos

Hello,

I am happy to join the forum and post my first question. I am involved in an EP6 implementation, would like to get some basic guidance on load balancing and various products and options available.

Q1. Generally for how many active users do we need to use a load balancer for EP6? Is it 200 or 500 or 1000 users?

Q2. Microsoft’s windows load balancer: Just wondering if any one used it in the past on any landscape. At what point can we eliminate this load balancer?

Q3. What are all various third party products available in the market for load balancing a web front-end ?

Q4. We expect approximately 2000 to 3000 users in our EP6 instance and approximately 1000 max active users at any given time. Do I really need a load balancer? If yes, what should be my key selection criteria?

Any help to understand Load balancing would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Steve

Accepted Solutions (0)

Answers (1)

Answers (1)

Former Member
0 Kudos

I think the load balancer question is more dependent on the number of app servers, than the number of users. And also on how "hard" you are pushing each.

If there is a high load on the servers, you are dependent on a good load balancing scheme (otherwise they might fail or deny connections).

Q3: I've used websphere edge with great success. (cpu has never been above 0.5% even during load testing)

Former Member
0 Kudos

You should use a Load Balancer when you have a group of clusters configured for High availability as it distributes the load across the servers thus improving traffic management. The best load balancer available in the market that I used is "F5 BigIP Load Balancer" from F5 networks (http://www.f5.com). It has a lot of options and few comes in my mind such as maintaining stickiness (affinity), SSL acceleration and lot more. It can handle more than million hits.

Former Member
0 Kudos

Are you aware of any specific configuration changes (steps) that are required, using visual administrator and/or the config tool, in order to make SAP portals work behind Big-IP?

Former Member
0 Kudos

Load Balancing makes sense when you have application clusters. Unless you've got a pretty stout server then I doubt you will serve 1000 concurrent users from a single host - and even then it doesn't make sense to put all your eggs in one basket.

Load balancing then serves a usefull purpose in a scalable environment becuase you simply add resources to the cluster and the load balancer takes care of integrating them for the users.

As for specific configuration, if you search for "proxy" in the help (http://help.sap.com) and you will find usefull information. Primarily you will be interested in the parameter ProxyMappings in the http provider service of the dispatcher - this is where you can configure the URLs generated by the Web App server to point to the proxy and not back to the web app server - the biggest issue with proxies is that URLs pointing to the web app host (behind the firewall) make it out to the clients and are not resolvable in DNS for the client.

Nick