VMS does network load balancing?

[Maagdenberg]

Can anybody confirm me if OpenVMS supports Network Load Balancing or LAN Aggregate Group or anything that is active-active redundant networking?

thanks,

Andre

[Hoff · Accepted solution]

Here assuming current/recent OpenVMS and current/recent TCP/IP Services, and not a third-party IP stack nor a discussion of DECnet and its capabilities...

These and other similar IP tasks are often handled with a front-end network processing device; with a typical high-end network router.

OpenVMS does offer IP address failover (IP failSAFE), and does offer full cluster alias capabilities, and does offer load balancing via loadbroker and such.

Within a cluster configuration, every IP link around can be active. That written, OpenVMS does not offer link aggregation.

Stephen Hoffman
HoffmanLabs LLC

[Maagdenberg]

Thanks Stephen. that was what I was looking for!

[Cass Witkowski]

Are you looking for load balancing to a single server or load balancing across several nodes in an OpenVMS cluster?

If the later, we use Load balancing with the Multinet stack from Process Software. Multinet computes the load rating in a fashion that is very similar to how how LAT would compute ratings. Most of the rating is based on CPU utilization on the node.

From what I have seen most of the front end load balancers either round-robin on a connection by connection basis or use PING response time to determine load on a node.

The round-robin method does not take the exisitng load on the server into account. The problem with the ping method is that in general the response time from a PING won't very significantly until the server is under high i.e. 95% CPU load.

[Maagdenberg]

replies to my thread have given me information that I was looking for.