Kemp LoadMaster 2600 Review

Kemp Technologies LoadMaster 2600 is built to balance the load on servers. Organizations can get the benefit of LoadMaster to increase application and server availability, clustering and fault tolerance, all of which provide the infrastructure for reliable applications, Internet sites, and corporate intranets. Kemp’s new appliance is an advanced, multi-port application delivery controller with Layer 7 content switching and integrated ASIC-based SSL acceleration. It comes with a user-friendly interface that offers various functionality and control to the IT administrator.

The LoadMaster 2600 has Layer 4/7 content switching and SSL acceleration for up to 2,000 transactions per second (TPS). It supports 1,000 physical and 500 virtual servers, as well as there are different methods of deployment where a single-arm mode uses one network port with all physical and virtual servers on the same network subnet. In our test setup, we opted for the two-arm mode which keeps physical and virtual servers separated on different subnets. It comes with four Ethernet ports which let you use two appliances for failover purposes.

You can configure the appliance easily and there are three methods of access. You can connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor to the appliance, it will show you the CLI (Command Line Interface). You can identify the appliance’s default IP address. Using a different laptop or PC, you get access to the web interface where you can modify settings and create balancing plans.

Simple Web-based UI: Kemp LoadMaster 2600 can be configured easily using it's easy to navigate UI. Simply connect your laptop/ PC with the appliance using a LAN (ethernet) cable, and connect PC with Kemp. Open a browser and enter the IP address of the LoadMaster, it will open Kemp’s UI. Using this, admin can manage load and set priority.

Performance: In our testing, we used a VMware ESX Server 4.1 system and created a virtual server. It has seven load balancing schemes. You can employ different schemes depending on your preference to intercept incoming requests and distribute them. It uses a smart traffic distribution that is based on real servers with the least number of connections. The load can be distributed depending on the weight response time; also, there is scheduling method that automatically adjusts the weight.

It has an agent, present in numerical values between 1 and 100 that can be defined depending on the server’s load. It can be used to gauge the server performance and balance the load. You just need to have the server running IIS rather than an alternative such as Apache. The LoadMaster 2600 comes with a decent range of L7 connection persistence methods which include cookies, session IDs and URLs along with rules for inspecting HTTP content.

We tested the LoadMaster 2600 in our labs on the virtual server using the Paessler’s Webserver Stress Tool 8.0 and configured it to simulate 2,000 users, each clicking on a webpage every five seconds. The result was quite good, as it was efficiently able to distribute the load across the real servers and during this test, Paessler detected no errors. We also created a virtual FTP server using our servers, in which we added an identical download folder containing 10 GB of test data. Then we logged on to the virtual server from three different clients using the FileZilla utility and then downloaded the test folder to test the load distribution. The appliance worked well and load sent to a different real server.