Implementing and Operating Cisco Enterprise Network Core Technologies (ENCOR) v1.2VirtualizationEasy
An enterprise is migrating its legacy physical load balancers to a virtualized environment to reduce hardware costs and increase deployment flexibility. They need to ensure that the new virtual load balancers can distribute traffic efficiently across a pool of web servers, perform health checks, and provide SSL offloading capabilities. Which type of virtualized network function (VNF) fulfills these requirements?
- AVirtual Load Balancer
- BVirtual WAN Optimizer
- CVirtual Router
- DVirtual Firewall
Show answer & explanationAnswer & explanation
Correct answer: A. Virtual Load Balancer
A Virtual Load Balancer is a software-based appliance that performs the same functions as a physical load balancer, but runs on a virtualized platform. It is specifically designed to distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers, perform health checks to ensure server availability, and can also provide advanced features like SSL offloading, directly meeting the requirements outlined in the scenario.
Why the other options are wrong
- B. A virtual WAN optimizer improves performance over wide area networks, not for local server load balancing.
- C. A virtual router provides routing services, not traffic distribution or SSL offloading.
- D. A virtual firewall provides security and traffic filtering, not load balancing.
Virtual Load Balancer
A software-based network function that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers to optimize resource utilization, maximize throughput, and ensure high availability.
- Runs as a virtual appliance on a hypervisor.
- Performs health checks on backend servers.
- Can provide advanced features like SSL offloading and content switching.
Memory trick: VNFs: Virtual Network Functions are Very Needed.