Web Farms and Load Balancers

MOVEit Gateway supports MOVEit Transfer web farms. A web farm is a collection of machines that each run a separate copy of MOVEit Transfer, but all copies share the same database, file system, and other resources. Web farms employ load balancers that allow an administrator to:

• Advertise a single URL to all users, with a single SSL certificate
• Distribute the load evenly over all application nodes to improve performance
• Provide fault tolerance; if an application node fails, the load balancer stops routing traffic to it until it comes back up

Some MOVEit Transfer web farms might use the built-in Microsoft Windows Network Load Balancing (NLB) feature to implement load balancing. NLB allows load balancing to be added to a cluster without having a separate node in front of the worker nodes. The load-balancing is built into the operating system and the feature is provided collectively by all worker nodes. MOVEit does not support the built-in Microsoft Windows Network Load Balancer (NLB) in the initial release of MOVEit Gateway.

Most enterprise web farm customers employ traditional load balancers from hardware vendors like Cisco and F5. The deployments below focus on this scenario.

One load balancer, many Gateways

The recommended load balancing scenario uses a single load balancer and multiple MOVEit Gateways, each running on a separate machine. Each MOVEit Gateway is dedicated to a specific MOVEit Transfer node. A failure of a MOVEit Transfer node, its SSH tunnel, or its associated MOVEit Gateway machine results in the automatic temporary removal of the node from the load balancer.

Note: The single load balancer is presumed to have high availability features that prevent it from becoming a single point of failure. This is generally a valid assumption for major load balancer vendors.