Load Sharing vs. Load Balancing on Cisco Routers
9/30/2002 by ITtoolbox Popular Q&A Team
ITtoolbox as adapted from CISCO-Infrastructure-L discussion group
What's the difference between load sharing and load balancing?
Disclaimer: Contents are not reviewed for correctness and are not endorsed or recommended by ITtoolbox or any vendor. Popular Q&A contents include summarized information from Cisco-L discussion unless otherwise noted.
Adapted from response by Luiz Lourenco d'Almeida on Tuesday, September 24, 2002
Load sharing means one can split the traffic from a network to be transported by different routers (paths). That's exactly what Cisco does with MHSRP. The document on Configuring Multichassis Multilink PPP states that when it tells it to configure half of the hosts with one default gateway and the second half with the other. What happens, for instance, if the first half of the hosts are off? Will the traffic of the second half be transported by both routers?
On the other hand, load balancing means distributing the traffic evenly and dynamically among different paths to avoid link congestion and saturation. This can be done in a packet-by-packet basis or per destination in a round-robin fashion. The packets sent by a host follow different paths to the same destination. All paths belong to all hosts. And this is not what MHSRP does.
Disclaimer: Contents are not reviewed for correctness and are not endorsed or recommended by Toolbox.com or any vendor.
Popular Q&A contents include summarized information from Cisco Infrastructure discussion unless otherwise noted.