Hi Zanyterp, Things weren't looking good, hence I was looking for the more left-field solutions. We are not strictly using DNS to Loadbalance, only for failover should our the primary site fail and even then it is not instanionous (about 8mins of downtime in our testing so far). Suggesting that Juniper don't support DNS Load balancing is like saying you don't support DNS. the SA is oblivious is to what is happening externally to it, for that reason we have to have a solution to provide geographic failover since Juniper dropped the DX (at mine and my customers extreme invconvience and cost). Having seperate nodes doesn't make sense in most cases as it increases the admin workload and the likelihood of an introduced configuration error occuring. Furthermore, despite the cluster license changes in version 7.0 (which the last time I looked still weren't adequatly documented) seperate nodes without local load balancers doesn't give the same guarentees as having a shared cluster across two locations. Specifcally, in the new licenseing there is a 5 day grace period before the license count drops back the surving nodes capacity. This means that we either have to double the licensing that we need, accept that during an outage 50% of capacity will be lost, or purchase ICE licesening at signifncant cost. The problem for us is that some customers we have a 2 week wait time before we can get into there data centre (crazy I know). We have recently had a problem with a cluster node which would intermittetly crash and require a cold boot before restarting, the case went on for 4 months before the issue was resolved, during that time would have been at 50% capacity for most of the duration. Whilst the new licesning scheme offers a new solution, it's not going to be right for everyone and I think a lot of -CL licenses will still be sold. The primary reason we have DNS failover versus local balancers is cost; an in the cloud service costs about $4000/year to maintain, the cheapest, nastiest hardware load balancers I could find which met the spec were ~$20,000 all in for the first year, the preffered F5 solution was ~$60,000.
... View more