Cisco Secure Firewall Services Module (FWSM)

Chapter 18 Firewall Load Balancing

Firewall load balancing is commonly seen in data centers or Internet architecture of e-commerce networks, where there is a high volume of traffic traversing the firewall infrastructure. With firewall load balancing, multiple firewalls can be referenced by a single IP address defined in a load balancer. The load balancer can distribute the traffic load among firewalls, or multiple virtual IP addresses (VIP) in a load balancer can reference firewalls for different traffic profiles, to give alignment between VIP and traffic profiles. The redundancy properties can be separated per traffic profiles attached to a VIP. This concept helps define a firewall cluster, which is a group of firewalls, aligned with load-balancing ...