LoadBalancer.org

LoadBalancer.org  Is one of many layer 7 load balancers on the market today.  I got turned onto them because they have an alignment with Cloudian object storage devices.  Think of Cloudian, as an on premises S3 storage buckets.  They are great for "cheap and deep" storage.  Cloudian nodes are not load balanced natively, and during jobs such as backups where it is the target, a single node can get over worked while the other nodes are bored. This is normal behavior when one is relaying on round robbing DNS for distributing load.

The LoadBalancer.org product is significantly cheaper than some of their competitors.  Their support is based out of the UK, so it is a bit more difficult to get a support person on the phone if one is in a different time zone.  They offer both virtual appliances and physical.  

I did a proof of concept built as an appliance, running on a retired VMware ESXi host that had a 10gb networking.  From beginning to end, I had it functioning in roughly an hour.  Super easy and straight forward, instructions for many use cases are laid out for users on their support site.  For the POC it did it's job by alleviating the "hot node" issue and allowing backups to take less time as multiple Cloudian nodes could do work at the same time. 

The physical appliances are rebranded Dell PowerEdge servers.  I had several problems bonding the 10gb NICs on our appliance.  Support was not much help as they know their product really well but not so much the network switch side of things.  Our issued ended up being odd behavior out of the Cisco Nexus 9k.  Word of advise: when re-using ports on a Cisco 9k run the "set default" command on the port before configuring it for it's new purpose.  Something was sticking in the configuration and the team was not cooperating until doing this for each port.

When using multiple VLANs the appliance breaks out the VLAN as a separate interface.  Think of it, and manage it just as if it was a separate physical NIC.  Also when looking at performance graphs keep in mind the difference between MBps and mbps.