Load balancing methods

The load balancing method defines how sessions are load balanced to real servers. A number of load balancing methods are available as listed below.

All load balancing methods will not send traffic to real servers that are down or not responding. However, the FortiGate unit can only determine if a real server is not responding by using a health check monitor. You should always add at least one health check monitor to a virtual server or to individual real servers, or load balancing methods may attempt to distribute sessions to real servers that are not functioning.

Static

The traffic load is statically spread evenly across all real servers. However, sessions are not assigned according to how busy individual real servers are. This load balancing method provides some persistence because all sessions from the same source address always go to the same real server. However, the distribution is stateless, so if a real server is added or removed (or goes up or down) the distribution is changed and persistence could be lost.

Round Robin

Directs new requests to the next real server, and treats all real servers as equals regardless of response time or number of connections. Dead real servers or non responsive real servers are avoided.

Weighted

Real servers with a higher weight value receive a larger percentage of connections. Set the real server weight when adding a real server.

Least Session

Directs requests to the real server that has the least number of current connections. This method works best in environments where the real servers or other equipment you are load balancing all have similar capabilities. This load balancing method uses the FortiGate session table to track the number of sessions being processed by each real server. The FortiGate unit cannot detect the number of sessions actually being processed by a real server.

Least RTT

Directs sessions to the real server with the least round trip time. The round trip time is determined by a Ping health check monitor and is defaulted to 0 if no Ping health check monitors are added to the virtual server.

First Alive

Always directs sessions to the first alive real server. This load balancing schedule provides real server failover protection by sending all sessions to the first alive real server and if that real server fails, sending all sessions to the next alive real server. Sessions are not distributed to all real servers so all sessions are processed by the “first” real server only.

First refers to the order of the real servers in the virtual server configuration. For example, if you add real servers A, B and C in that order, then all sessions always go to A as long as it is alive. If A goes down then sessions go to B and if B goes down sessions go to C. If A comes back up sessions go back to A. Real servers are ordered in the virtual server configuration in the order in which you add them, with the most recently added real server last. If you want to change the order you must delete and re-add real servers in the required order.

HTTP Host

Load balances HTTP host connections across multiple real servers using the host’s HTTP header to guide the connection to the correct real server.