What algorithms can be used to load balance firewalls on the CSM?
A. Most new load balancers, as well as the CSM, can choose different balancing criteria based on protocol. They can also be intelligent about remembering where connections arrive from. In these scenarios, for those protocols that do not need fix-ups, or for which the load balancer has fixups, you can use whatever balancing metric you wish for FWLB. For example, the CSM can FW-load balance HTTP, FTP, Telnet, and SMTP using any metric (least connections, etc work fine) and use address hashing algorithms for “everything else.” It can be very beneficial to use an “even” balancing metric for most of your traffic (HTTP, SMTP, whatever) rather than an address hash which can result in slightly unbalanced traffic profiles. So the basic idea is to use the best algorithm you can for those protocols that allow it, and use address hashing for everything else.
