Tom I have to say that our experience of Barracuda Loadbalancers (physical 440 appliances) for Loadbalancing Exchange 2010 has been pretty poor. Some other members of the team refer to the LB440s as "chocolate teapots" compared the reliability of some of our other kit.
We've had the boxes for just over a year, and we struggled all the way through 3.X, 4.0 and 4.1 code, with binaries crashing, core dumps being taken by development teams, and it's only in the past three months running 4.2.0.015 code have we had a stable service. I think there was an oddity with one part of OWA that we had been having problems with from the outset that was magically fixed by one firmware upgrade but wasn't described in the release notes. The Barracuda is pretty good at detecting when a binary has crashed and restarting it, but there's a 2-3 minute outage when that happens. The HA failover between devices only cuts in for "proper service outages" that last minutes - it's definitely not hitless failover. The LB Barracuda support is based out of India but they are pretty responsive, are knowledgeable L2-L3 engineers, have a direct line to the developers, and speak good English, so if you want to open a call e-mail supp...@barracuda.com<mailto:supp...@barracuda.com> but copy in linkandloadsupport_t...@barracuda.com<mailto:linkandloadsupport_t...@barracuda.com> and they'll be on the case pretty quickly. If you're able to enable the support tunnel (you initiate a SSH connection from the LB440 back to their systems) they can diagnose what's gone wrong fairly well. Just to add insult to injury one batch of firmware was good at messing up the disk partitions and hence bricking the appliances, although thankfully we didn't lose both at the same time so we've even had both devices swapped out under next day replacement. They've earnt their money for the first year support contract. After almost a year of pain with multiple release of code, up until last week we had just had 3 months of uninterrupted service. But last week we had a tell-tale sign of a binary crash with a 2-3min outage. The crash (after analysis of the core dump by Barracuda) is a bug they've already fixed in 4.2.1.006..... now I'm asking questions about how stable this new release is, and we'll have the dilemma of staying put or branching off into the unknown new firmware. I think it's true to say that all the issues we've had have not resulted in service outages more than a few minutes, but there have been plenty of those. And if a binary crash is going to occur it's going to be when it's busy, typically not in the middle of the night. We have approx. 5000 users and traffic peaks between 50-70Mbit's on LB440 during busy periods. It's doing the full range of protocols including IMAPS and POPS. Our experiences may have fixed all the problems for everyone else, but you can make up your own minds. Sent to you via a Barracuda LB440 :) _________________________________ Tomo | Senior Infrastructure Engineer - Networks, Telecoms & Security. Direct line +44 (0)20 7000 7777 www.london.edu<http://www.london.edu/> | London experience. World impact. Connect with us: [Description: Description: twitter.jpg] <https://twitter.com/LondonBSchool> Follow us on Twitter<https://twitter.com/LondonBSchool> [Description: Description: facebook.jpg] <http://www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/London-Business-School/14027365105> Become a fan on Facebook<http://www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/London-Business-School/14027365105> From: Tom Miller [mailto:tmil...@sfgtrust.com] Sent: 11 February 2013 14:59 To: MS-Exchange Admin Issues Subject: Barracuda Load Balancer Hi Folks, I'm about to trial the Barracuda Load Balancer 440Vx on VMWare for Exchange 2010 (it will replace standard Windows NLB). For those of you using this series, any words of wisdom? Thanks, Tom --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com<mailto:listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com> with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe exchangelist
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