Inexpensive Load Balance solution?

V

vr.

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Want to setup a couple Exchange 2010 servers for high availability. Don't want to use NLB because it has its own issues. What kind of GUI based, relatively easy to use, low cost load balancer solutions are out there? Is ideal a pair of them working together so the LB doesn't become the single point of failure?
 
Cisco ACE 4710 load-balancers meet your requirements except they're not cheap. Keep in mind unless your entire infrastructure is redundant from end to end there is little point in forking out the extra dough for redundant LBs.

You're probably better off with an exchange cluster, if you're not already familiar with load-balancers and how to configure and maintain them, but that's not really my area of expertise anymore.
 
Not sure if it will meet your needs, but the barracuda load balancers and they aren't to hard on the pocket, but yeah, if both your exchange servers are local, just do a cluster setup .
 
Thanks for the replies so far, still looking. Also, Exchange 2010 doesn't use clustering anymore in the traditional sense. It uses DAGs which are a subset of cluster services and only protect the mailbox databases. The client access and hub transport portions needs additional footwork to be made highly available.
 
vr. said:
Did you split them because you had to in order to make the load balancer work, or some other reason?
Click to expand...

I split them just for that reason: to provide load balancing and redundancy for the CAS/HUB roles.

My configuration is very similar to the 4 member DAG, though there's no reason you couldn't put a balancer in front of the 2 member DAG/CAS/HUB.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd979781.aspx#Two
 
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