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Balancing network loads to optimize user traffic (cluster administrators only)

You can configure your cluster to serve client requests from appropriately loaded LIFs. This results in a more balanced utilization of LIFs and ports, which in turn allows for better performance of the cluster.

  • What DNS load balancing is
    DNS load balancing helps in selecting an appropriately loaded data LIF and balancing user network traffic across all available ports (physical, interface groups, and VLANs).
  • How DNS load balancing works
    Clients mount an SVM by specifying an IP address (associated with a LIF) or a host name (associated with multiple IP addresses). By default, LIFs are selected by the site-wide DNS server in a round-robin manner, which balances the workload across all LIFs.
  • Creating a DNS load balancing zone
    You can create a DNS load balancing zone to facilitate the dynamic selection of a LIF based on the load, that is, the number of clients mounted on a LIF. You can create a load balancing zone while creating a data LIF.
  • Adding or removing a LIF from a load balancing zone
    You can add or remove a LIF from the DNS load balancing zone of a storage virtual machine (SVM). You can also remove all the LIFs simultaneously from a load balancing zone.