What is the use of a load balancer?
a) It can be used to increase the capacity of a server farm beyond that of a single server.
b) It can also allow the service to continue even in the face of server down time due to server failure or server maintenance.
c) Different virtual servers can be configured for different sets of physical services, such as TCP and UDP services in general. Protocol- or application-specific virtual servers that may be supported include HTTP, FTP, SSL, SSL BRIDGE, SSL TCP, NNTP and DNS.
d) It manages the selection of an appropriate physical server in a server farm.
e) It performs server monitoring of services in a Web servers farm. In case of failure of a service, the load balancer continues to perform load balancing across the remaining services that are UP. In case of failure of all the Dedicated servers bound to a virtual server, requests may be sent to a backup virtual server (if configured) or optionally redirected to a configured URL. For example, a page on a local or remote server which provides information on the site maintenance or outage.
