What is the main purpose of implementing redundancy for a load balancer?

Ensure high availability and continuous service

Reduce overall network traffic volume

In an active-passive load balancer setup, which state is the secondary load balancer typically in during normal operations?

Standby or Passive, ready to take over

Disabled, awaiting manual activation

Monitoring only, not part of the active path

The passive load balancer will automatically take over, potentially causing a brief interruption but resuming service.

All connections will be immediately dropped and require manual restart of the entire system.

All traffic will be routed directly to backend servers, bypassing any load balancing.

The system will continue to operate normally with reduced capacity until the active unit is restored.

Better utilization of resources as both load balancers can process traffic simultaneously

Simpler configuration and management

Faster failover time in all scenarios

It allows the passive load balancer to seamlessly take over traffic by assuming ownership of the VIP from the failed active unit.

It provides a unique IP address for each individual backend server.

It encrypts all traffic exchanged between the client and the load balancer.

It assigns different port numbers to distinct services running on the same backend server.

DNS caching issues on client devices, causing delayed client redirection to the healthy data center.

Limited bandwidth between data centers, restricting traffic volume.

The need for specialized hardware that is difficult to acquire.

High power consumption of GSLB devices, leading to increased operational costs.

Complexity of state synchronization between active units to maintain connection persistence during a failover.

Increased physical space requirements for the additional hardware.

Higher bandwidth requirements for internal load balancer communication.

Difficulty in scaling the number of backend application servers.

Faster failover times without client-side caching concerns.

Higher network throughput and capacity.

Easier management across different vendor load balancer products.

Better integration with cloud-native services and serverless architectures.

Redundancy and failover strategies for load balancers - Test Paper