Not necessarily opposed to migrating to the ULB version. There were a few red flags.
1 - Lack of support for newer versions of Windows.
2 - The website freely mentioning seeking an alternative product.
3 - The fact that it's more of a migration than an upgrade.
None of these are show stoppers but we'd probably end up with a Linux version as we're not really into obsolete versions of Windows.
It doesn't seem like it was that long ago that we moved to the LLB version that we are on and I seem to remember that was a pretty hairy upgrade to. However IBM support was fantastic and helped us a lot with modifying our .cfg file to work. I do remember a little conversation about something to the effect that since we weren't using IPv6 we probably didn't need ULB. I guess if I knew that LLB was on life support I would have migrated to ULB then.
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Robert Berendt
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Original Message:
Sent: Fri February 12, 2021 10:28 AM
From: Jacob Banda
Subject: Migration from Load Balancer for IPv4
Hello Robert,
Just curious: is there something you don't like or feel wouldn't be a good fit about the IBM replacement, WebSphere's Load Balancer for IPv4 and IPv6 (ULB)?
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Jacob Banda
Original Message:
Sent: Thu February 11, 2021 02:37 PM
From: Robert Berendt
Subject: Migration from Load Balancer for IPv4
Looking for recommendations to replace our two IBM WebSphere Edge Components: Load Balancer for IPv4 8.0.0.7 servers because of this:
https://community.ibm.com/community/user/middleware/blogs/elizabeth-riggins/2018/09/13/important-news-regarding-end-of-support-for-load-b
We have two Windows based Edge servers which are both rather dated. One in our DMZ and one internal. We use the DMZ one to route an external address to an internal address. The internal ones are for routing to an appropriate end point. Let me explain. Let's say we go to https://something.dekko.com That goes to the Edge server and it routes something.dekko.com to one of a number of servers based on server availability. The Edge server has some intelligence in it to do stuff like if I go to https://something01.dekko.com and that test doesn't return a particular string then don't use that server. Round robin DNS or simple ping's aren't enough.
We will look at the IBM solution also but since it's more of a complete migration than an upgrade, and they even mentioned looking at other products in their post, why not? While I tend to lean towards Windows because of staffing I understand that people tend to prefer Linux for this sort of thing for some reason or another. IBM seems to be giving Windows the kiss off for this product.
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Robert Berendt
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