Installation guide

6-5
Device Manager Guide, Cisco ACE 4700 Series Application Control Engine Appliance
OL-26645-02
Chapter 6 Configuring Real Servers and Server Farms
Configuring Real Servers
Related Topic
• Configuring Dynamic Workload Scaling, page 6-14
Server Farms
Typically, in data centers, servers are organized into related groups called server farms. Servers within
server farms often contain identical content (referred to as mirrored content) so that if one server
becomes inoperative, another server can take its place immediately. Also, having mirrored content
allows several servers to share the load of increased demand during important local or international
events, such as the Olympic Games. This phenomenon of a sudden large demand for content is called a
flash crowd.
After you create and name a server farm, you can add existing real servers to it and configure other server
farm parameters, such as the load-balancing predictor, server weight, backup server, health probe, and
so on. For a listing and brief description of load-balancing predictors, see Load-Balancing Predictors,
page 6-2.
Related Topic
Configuring Server Farms, page 6-18
Configuring Real Servers
Real servers are dedicated physical servers that are typically configured in groups called server farms.
These servers provide services to clients, such as HTTP or XML content, streaming media (video or
audio), TFTP or FTP services, and so on. When configuring real servers, you assign names to them and
specify IP addresses, connection limits, and weight values.
The ACE appliance uses traffic classification maps (class maps) within policy maps to filter specified
traffic and to apply specific actions to that traffic based on the load-balancing configuration. A
load-balancing predictor algorithm (round-robin or least connections) determines the servers to which
the ACE appliance sends connection requests. For information about configuring class maps, see
Configuring Virtual Context Class Maps, page 12-8.
Use this procedure to configure load balancing on real servers.
Procedure
Step 1 Choose Config > Virtual Contexts > context > Load Balancing > Real Servers. The Real Servers
table appears.
Step 2 Click Add to add a new real server, or select a real server you want to modify, and then click Edit. The
Real Servers configuration screen appears.
Step 3 Configure the server using the information in Table 6-1.