VMware NSX for vSphere: Network Services

Load Balancer
Welcome to Pluralsight. You are watching Load Balancer. So now let's dive into the load balancing functionality of the Edge Services Gateway, so we didn't go into that in really detail at all in the ESG lesson because I wanted to go into it here and kind of split it off as it can be pretty deep. So load balancing has been around a long time and the idea is to spread requests from clients across a farm of servers or within NSX we call them server pools, and the idea is you may have, you know, kind of that traditional, you know, obvious example is a bunch of web servers. So you may have a bunch of web servers servicing requests from clients, and you want to be able to scale performance up by adding more servers and you want to be able to sustain an outage of one or more servers and just kind of take them out of rotation if they're not doing well. So load balancing lets you do that. You can monitor your servers, you can make sure they're up and functioning, if not it'll pull them out of the pool. You can create rules for applications, you can do like, you know, rewrite at HTTP request, do all sorts of other things, other types of, you know, logic and intelligence and the NSX load balancer supports up to layer 7, so not just port and, you know, IP, but it can also look into the request and see where it needs to do and how it needs to handle that, much more intelligent than just a basic, you know, layer 3 or I guess layer 4 load balancer.