IP services loading issues has always been in the minds of system administrators. Before load balancing products like WebMux became available, the solutions are either continuously upgrading to bigger server or using multiple servers with multiple IP addresses access points. While the contents or services provided by these servers are the same, different clients are assigned to different servers.

Although the availability of the load balancer has eased the load handing issues, how to migrate the existing system with the minimum interruption is a challenge to many.

In an one IP address, one server setup, adding a load balancer and additional servers are straight forward. But in a multiple IP addresses with multiple server setup, the best solution is not as easy as it may appears.

While the most obvious solution is to map all the domains into one IP address/port, it may not be practical. Although most the web, ftp and e-mail accesses are using domain names, other IP applications like many UDP services are often accesses through hard coded IP address/port. It will cause a major service interruption for the clients to ask the clients to re-program the IP address.

An obvious solution is to set up multiple virtual farms that maps to a same group of servers. Existing clients does not need to make any changes to enjoy the benefit load balancing and fail over protection. While this solution sounds simple and indeed it is very easy to setup with WebMux, many other load balancer on the market does not support this important function. Without WebMux's full flexibility of to let any server/port to associate with any virtual farms, the clients may be forced to re-program hard coded setup that can cause time, recourses, lost of services and money.