Server Load balancing with NAT, using Nexus switches: ITD

Server load balancer (SLB) has become very common in network deployments, as the data & video traffic are expanding at rapid rate. There are various modes of SLB deployments today. Application load balancing with network address translation (NAT) has become a necessity for various benefits.

Cisco Intelligent Traffic Director (ITD) is a hardware based multi-terabit layer 4 load-balancing and traffic steering solution on the Nexus 5k/6k/7k/9k series of switches.

With our latest NX-OS Software 7.2(1)D1(1) (also known as Gibraltar MR), ITD supports SLB NAT on Nexus 7k series of switches.

In SLB-NAT deployment, client can send traffic to a virtual IP address, and need not know about the IP of the underlying servers. NAT provides additional security in hiding the real server IP from the outside world. In the case of Virtualized server environments, this NAT capability provides increased flexibility in moving the real servers across the different server pools with out being noticed by the their clients. With respect health monitoring and traffic reassignment, SLB NAT helps applications to work seamlessly without client being aware of any IP change.

ITD won the Best of Interop 2015 in Data Center Category.

ITD provides :

Zero latency load-balancing.

CAPEX savings : No service module or external L3/L4 load-balancer needed. Every Nexus port can be used as load-balancer.

IP-stickiness

Resilient (like resilient ECMP), Consistent hash

Bi-directional flow-coherency. Traffic from A–>B and B–>A goes to same node.

Monitoring the health of servers/appliances.

Handles unlimited number of flows.

Documentation, slides, videos:

White paper: At a glance

Webinar and Demo recording: Recording

Learn How to deploy ITD in 10 minutes: Video

ITD config guide: ITD config guide

Best Practices Guide: ITD with ASA Firewall

Deployment Guide: ITD for DSR Server Load-balancing

Email Query or feedback:ask-itd@external.cisco.com

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