A systems administrator is managing a web farm consisting of three servers behind a hardware load balancer to ensure high availability. Two of the servers are older models, while the third is a new, high-performance machine. The administrator notices that the two older servers are frequently operating at high CPU and memory utilization, while the new server remains underutilized. All servers are receiving an equal number of incoming connections. Which load balancing method is most likely configured?
The correct answer is Round robin. This load balancing algorithm distributes incoming requests sequentially to each server in a pool without considering the individual server's current load or processing capabilities. This explains why each server receives an equal number of connections, causing the less powerful servers to be overloaded while the high-performance server is underutilized.
Weighted round robin is incorrect because this method is specifically designed to prevent the issue described. It allows an administrator to assign a 'weight' to each server based on its capacity, directing more traffic to more powerful machines.
Least connections is incorrect. This dynamic algorithm sends new requests to the server with the fewest active connections. In this scenario, it would likely direct more traffic to the underutilized new server, thus balancing the load more effectively.
Active-passive is incorrect. This is a failover clustering configuration, not a load-balancing method for distributing traffic across multiple active servers. In an active-passive setup, one server handles all traffic while the other is on standby, which does not match the scenario where all three servers are receiving connections.
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What is a Round Robin load balancing algorithm?
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How does Weighted Round Robin differ from Round Robin?
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What is the role of an Active-Passive configuration in server management?
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How does the round robin algorithm work in load balancing?
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What are the advantages of using weighted round robin instead of standard round robin?
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Why is least connections a better alternative in some scenarios?