Enhanced Load Balancing Clustering (ELBC)

ELBC uses FortiSwitch-5000 series load balancers to load balance traffic to FortiGate-5000 workers installed in a FortiGate-5000 chassis. ELBC enhances scalability, reliability, and availability of mission critical IP-based services, such as firewall, antivirus, web filtering, IPS, and so on. It also provides high availability by detecting worker failures and automatically redistributing traffic to the workers that are still operating.

ELBC applies a load balancing algorithm against the source and/or destination address of packets to generate a hash key value. Each worker has hash key values assigned to it. If the workers are running, then the traffic is forwarded to the worker assigned to the hash key. The hash key value generated by the algorithm, the hash keys accepted by the worker blades, and the blade the traffic is sent to are automatically calculated by the FortiSwitch.

For more information about ELBC see the ELBC Configuration Guide.

You cannot mix FGCP and ELBC clusters in the same FortiGate-5000 chassis.