April 12, 2012 at 8:11 am
Anyone using the Citrix Netscaler DataStream technology in a production environment?
It looks pretty smooth (NOT for Denali)... It appears like it can load balance between multiple SQL instances (principal and mirror/database snapshot) and also perform an automated failover leveraging a Virtual IP.
http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/subfeature.asp?contentID=2309521
April 16, 2012 at 5:10 pm
We aren't using it but we've considered it. I've had a pretty lengthy conversation about what it does and doesn't do with the folks at Citrix. It's primary advantage over other load balancers is that since it can parse the TDS protocol, it can determine what is a read operation (SELECT) and what is a write operation (INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE) when those keywords are used. As a result, it can spread the load for the read operations while sending all writes to a single destination. However, once you write to that destination, it's up to some other mechanism, such as replication, log shipping, etc., to get the data to the other SQL Servers that are being used for read.
If you were just looking at read type operations, technically you can set up most load balancers in this fashion, such as the F5 BigIP. I know that if you want to add support for mirroring, you have to do a bit of iRules coding, but it can be done.
K. Brian Kelley
@kbriankelley
April 17, 2012 at 1:30 pm
We use it and it works very reliably in our enviroment. Never had an issue with it to my knowledge.
If theres an issue with a server in the load balanced group I can just disable it and everything carries on.
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