Forum Discussion
evan_25724
Nimbostratus
NimbostratusLesser of two evils: 2,500 pools or one pool with 10,000 members?
My customer load balances requests to an EAI system which requires that there are servers listening on 2,500 ports (not all servers are listening on all ports). The legacy approach has been to create one pool per port (each pool has four members is monitored by the built in "tcp" monitor). Despite the obvious drawbacks to his, in practice it works reasonably well.
The customer is open to a new approach. The one that makes the most sense to me is one pool with an instance of each of the 4 servers for each port (see example below).
My questions:
Which approach is the lesser of two evils? Why?
Is my customer likely to run into hard limits with either approach (too many pools or too many members per pool)?
Thank you so much!
Evan
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2 Replies
hoolioCirrostratus
Hi Evan,
There aren't any hard limits on members per pool or total numbers of pools. But at some point, management of the LTM will become slow. This depends on the total number of objects in the config as well as the platform's CPU and memory specs. Doing perf testing on a test unit is the best way to determine what impact the size of the config will have on traffic processing and manageability.
Do all of the servers on a single IP need to be up for a single server to be considered available? If so, a pool per server would make the most sense with monitors that have hardcoded destination ports assigned to each member. If not, I'd guess one big pool would be slightly more efficient than a lot of small pools.
If you could have all servers listening on the same ports and clients make requests to the same destination port as the servers listen on, you could potentially use a single pool member per server IP on port 0 and avoid doing port translation.
Aaron- evan_25724Thank you so much, Hoolio! I really appreciate your taking the time to respond to my question.
Evan
