As a load balancer,

Managed File Transfer

Gateway spreads connections evenly across the clustered systems. This load balancing algorithm is called “round-robin”, which is a common load balancing standard.

FTP, FTPS and SFTP are stateful protocols and use the round robin algorithm to load balance connections across the systems in the cluster.

HTTP/S is a stateless protocol which also uses the round robin algorithm, however it needs to persist each connection (for a period of time) to the same HTTP/S server in order to maintain the integrity of the session. This is important because the user’s HTTP/S session is typically only able to be serviced by a single HTTP/S server at a time.

The configuration settings for the round-robin load balancing rules are located in the gateway.xml file (found in the installation folder). For new installations, the

gateway.xml

file already has the rules provided for load balancing with in a clustered environment. Prior installations of

Managed File Transfer

Gateway (that upgrade to version 2.0.0) will need to add the Load Balancing rules to the

gateway.xml

file.