Today's free download is provided by Kemp Technologies. They offer a free load balancer for different virtualization platforms – VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM, Oracle VirtualBox or Citrix XenServer.
The free product has some limitations of course, but still, it's free. And if you like it you can upgrade as you'll be all ready familiar with its functions. Possible usage I can think of might be the following – web sites and applications, DevOps testing environments, technical training environments or just a lab where you can test the product by yourself. You should not use this free product for direct commercial application.
It can be used without charge in production environments with throughput requirements that don’t exceed 20 Mbps. You don't have to deploy it locally if you don't have your own datacenter or hypervisor. It can be deployed in the Cloud on Microsoft Azure, VMware vCloud Air, Amazon Web Services, or other Cloud-hosted servers.
What's a load balancer for?
I had the same question when visiting Kemp booth at VMworld Barcelona and I spoke to Kemp engineers about the most common use cases for load balancers. Every application which is IP based can be load balanced with Kemp load balancer.
It means that you can have an enterprise application which is IP based, and we can protect this application against overload, via a load balancer.
Quote:
Kemp is offering the Free LoadMaster to help small companies and developers by providing them with a robust and proven load balancing option. As their load balancing needs grow and expand, they will be able to upgrade to a commercial version in the future, since they will already be comfortable with and knowledgeable about the LoadMaster.
There is no catch. The product is free to download and use.
Here is a video from VMworld Barcelona 2019:
Free Load Balancer from Kemp – The Features:
The features list is long. You can have a look at this page at FreeLoadbalancer.com where you will find All features listed. Now let's talk about some of them:
Layer 4 load balancing – Traditional Transport Level load balancing. Packets are routed to backend servers based on IP Address, TCP port or UDP port, using DNS round robin or least connection algorithms.
Layer 7 load balancing – packet routing based on the target applications and content of the network packets. Layer 7 Load Balancing operates at the Application Layer of the network stack. Using it LoadMaster can route network traffic to the server most suited to handle the requests.
Content Caching – LoadMaster can store recently accessed content in a local storage location. This allows content to be served to subsequent requests more quickly without having to get data from the original source. The local caches can have a time to live value associated with them. This ensures that after a pre-set period the local copy of the content is deleted and the original source is queried anew. This timeout can be set as required depending on the content type.
Preconfigured virtual service templates – Templates with all the common settings for various applications preconfigured are available to use with LoadMaster. These make it easy to deploy the load balancer quickly and securely in typical deployment scenarios. Templates are available for many enterprise server applications including Microsoft Exchange, Skype, SharePoint, ADFS 2.0, and RDS. Also VMware Horizon View, Horizon Workspace and Log Insight 2.0. Others such as Oracle E-Business Suite, SAP, MobileIron and others are also provided at the LoadMaster Documentation site.
Web Application Firewall – LoadMaster can function as a Web Application Firewall (WAF) via a free add on enhancement pack. WAF builds on and enhances traditional firewall security protection. Traditional firewalls don’t stop encrypted HTTPS traffic as they have no visibility of the content within. WAF operates at the Application Layer 7 of the network stack and it can decrypt HTTPS traffic to inspect the data content. In conjunction with constantly updated lists of known attack methods, WAF can deny access to servers when malicious activity is detected.
Also interesting: Load Balancing is All about Application Experience – detailed post about management at scale of many load balancers with cloud management products.
Go ahead and download your copy at FreeLoadbalancer.com
Check the KempTechnologies website for other products too, especially the Kemp 360 Central which is the main UI, the main control console where you monitor the traffic flow, manage all the Loadmasters from a single console.
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