Local Agencies Meet Surging Demands with Load Balancers

Sussex County Uses Load Balancing for Virtual Desktops

Sussex County deploys load balancers across its five data centers to ensure high availability of its v­irtual desktop and applications.

In its data center for administrative departments, for example, the county installed two Barracuda Load Balancer ADC 340 appliances that sit in front of 15 servers, including multiple Microsoft Exchange Server devices and ­multiple connection and security servers for its VMware Horizon virtual desktop environment.

The Barracuda ­appliances serve as the main load balancer when employees request access to their virtual desktops and applications. 

Within the servers, Kosinetz and his team also installed VMware’s ­software-based NSX Advanced Load Balancer in front of two application servers that host 60 virtualized or containerized ­applications, including Microsoft Office, Adobe software, and finance and purchasing apps.

The county uses a round-robin approach, where a user request goes to one server and the next request goes to another server.

“If you get a spike in users, you don’t overstress server resources,” he says.

The IT department chose VMware’s NSX load balancer in front of its application servers because it fits well with the county’s VMware ­virtual environment. 

“It’s part of the infrastructure that creates a stable environment to handle the usage demand,” says ­ William Kosinetz, CIO of Sussex County, N.J. Source: 

A virtual load ­balancer is convenient because the IT staff doesn’t have to worry about additional power, cooling or network cables that a hardware appliance would need, Kosinetz says.

Today, county employees work out of their offices on staggered shifts to ensure everyone is socially distanced, but 80 percent of the staff still works remotely part time. Employees access their virtual desktops on zero- client devices in the office and on Chromebooks at home.

Overall, the virtual desktop environment has worked perfectly during the pandemic — and the load balancers are a big reason why, Kosinetz says.

“Our applications are stable and quick,” he says.

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Alexandria Seeks Speedy Website Performance for Residents 

In Virginia, the city of Alexandria has always used a mix of Citrix ADC physical and software-based load balancers to improve ­application ­performance and to handle spikes in web traffic, such as on e­lection day.

“Our residents may not know it, but when they pay taxes or look up building permits, they are going through our load ­balancer to get a seamless ­experience,” says Alexandria CIO Vanetta Pledger.

The city’s load balancers became even more important during the COVID-19 outbreak because they handled the influx of 1,500 employees who ­suddenly needed remote VPN access to the city’s network.

The load balancers also ­optimize the performance of new, temporary websites that the city launched during the pandemic so residents could apply for housing assistance and small ­business grants and get news on food distribution and COVID-19 ­vaccines, Pledger says.

“We don’t want people to get a ‘page loading’ message or timeout error, so the load ­balancers give a timelier response,” she says.

The ADC appliances not only improve performance and ensure ­redundancy, they also bolster ­security. The load ­balancers serve as a gateway between the outside world and the inside world and block ­malicious traffic, such as ­malware and distributed denial of service attacks, says Information Technology Services Deputy Director Ryon Saenz.

The city relies on the virtual software version of Citrix ADC for any high-demand websites or web-based serv­ices. The benefit of virtual load balancers is that the ITS staff can spin them up quickly to ensure fast website speeds.

“It gives us the flexibility and agility to scale out quickly,” Saenz says.

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Best Practices for Load Balancers

In Texas, El Paso County also uses load balancer appliances to increase capacity, allowing for more concurrent users and improving the reliability of applications, such as its law enforcement records management system, says Christopher Stathis, the county’s CIO.

Stathis and his team say appliance load balancers are complex and not always easy to implement. They recommend that government IT staffers reach out to their application vendors for assistance if needed. 

“It is very important to ensure that the applications are set up with the help of enterprise application vendors,” Stathis says. “We have found that many application vendors do not have much experience with having their products being balanced. As a result, we must work hard to get their products functional on these appliances.”

In Alexandria, Citrix ADC constantly monitors system resources and sends alerts to the ITS staff if server utilization reaches a certain threshold that could impact performance. The staff may add more servers into the load balancing pool to ensure good performance, says Alexandria CISO Anthony Harvey.

Overall, load balancers might not get a lot of glory, but they are an important piece of the data center infrastructure, he says.

“Load balancers are critical,” Harvey says. “If you get spikes in traffic, you can shift the traffic on the fly. It makes it a more agile environment for us.”