Re: SSL acceleration for a web farm

[kwijibo@xxxxxxxxxx]

Ryan Leathers wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have been using LVS for a small farm for a couple of years now.  I am
> interested in adding SSL hardware acceleration to my two LVS servers.
> It is my goal to maintain performance by offloading the SSL chores, and
> reduce the cost of certificate renewal by not applying certificates to
> my web servers.  
>
> Can anyone offer advice from experience doing the same?  I am using an
> LVS-NAT configuration currently and am happy with it.  It has been
> suggested that I get a commercial product to do this (Big-IP from F5)
> which I am not absolutely opposed to, but if there is a good track
> record with adding SSL hardware acceleration to LVS then I will be happy
> to stick with what I've been using.
Why are you worrying about offloading it?  I would just buy some boxes
with faster CPU's if speed is a concern.  The time it takes to ship
the data back and forth over the bus to the SSL accelerator your processor
probably could have taken care of it.  Especially if the algorithm uses
all the bell and whistle features todays CPUs have.