We are using a E250si by coyotepoint.
Reasons why we opted for this particular loadbalancer
- We wanted a turn-key solution, which this piece of hardware is.
- Price (we got it used with a year of support left on eBay).
- Webbased interface - really easy to use (e.g. setup a cluster, quiesce a server, troubleshoot, statistics, ...), even if you're not a system administrator.
- Semi-personal relationship with the company (or rather with someone working for them at that time).
- FreeBSD based - we run FreeBSD almost exclusively and I prefer a solution which doesn't add yet another technology to the stack.
One of the things to add is that even though the loadbalancer only has four physical ports, you can enable more ports by hooking up a switch to one of your physical ports - and hereby extending by
There's not so much to say about this loadbalancer. It's been good to us and has been running without a reboot and any issues for 10 months or so now. Whenever a server failed, it was taken out of rotation instantly. Not so much I can complain.
Initially there's a few things to get used and if I had to think about weak spots, only two come to mind:
- When you're handling more than 4 mbit/s incoming it can get a bit slow - and really, really slow when you enable features such as stickyness. We peak at 5-6 mbit/s usually but because we disabled stickyness, server agents, probes and use the very basic round_robin policy, it's all good.
- The web interface use JavaScript/ajax for parts of the display - and those are pretty buggy, though a sales@ person told me they are resolved if we do the software update.
All in all, the E250si saved us the all configuration and maintaining another server, etc.. But since I heard so many good things about HAproxy and pound, we will probably sooner or later migrate in this direction. If I go the software route though, I'd be very very picky after the components I put into the server - e.g. mainboard, network cards, etc..