Hardware load balancers

Horizontal or vertical scaling implementations can now use a supported third-party hardware load balancer in place of a Service Manager load balancer process. Hardware load balancers can offer the following advantages over a Service Manager load balancer process:

  • Offer a variety of load balancing algorithms
  • Offer SSL acceleration or offloading capabilities
  • Offer error detection and correction functionality
  • Increase system resources available on a Service Manager host by removing a load balancer process
  • Reduce the number communications ports required between Service Manager clients and servers
  • Offers option to run Service Manager from a private network with the hardware load balancer acting as a network gateway

Note Some customers may choose to omit the web server component in their implementations. While this is a viable configuration (the exact reasons for choosing such a configuration vary), HPE recommends that customers adhere to the best practice of implementing the Service Manager web tier product in a standard web server with Java application server configuration. That is, you should use a combination of products, such as an Apache HTTP Server and Apache Tomcat to host the Service Manager web tier. This is particularly important when there is a requirement to implement SSO or TSO functionality in your environment.