The Load Balancer

A load balancer must be used in front of the cluster in order to distribute the load among the cluster nodes.
The load balancer used must support (and be configured to use) sticky sessions/session affinity.

You can use any kind of load balancer - hardware, software, round-robin DNS, etc.
The load balancer should provide it's services using the same cluster/network alias you configure in IFS Installer, i.e. clients should connect to the cluster using the hostname and port you specify during installation.

Load Balancer

A Load Balancer is required for all middle tier High End scenarios.

Why use Load Balancing?

There are two main reasons for using load balancing

1. Scalability: A single server cannot handle the load from all users in larger installations
2. High Availability: Redundancy

Load Balancing Hardware/Software

You can load balance using either dedicated hardware or using software.

Requirements

The load balancer must implement sticky sessions (session affinity).

Limitations

Load balancing of IFS Connect Server is possible only for File Reader.
Even if it is possible to run multiple instances of IFS Connect Server, as described here, only the File Reader supports multiple reads from the same source file repository. Several IFS Connect Server instances can then read from the same repository (note however that all IFS Connect Servers must have write access to the repository).
But the file repository will be then a single point of failure anyway.

Load Balancer with IFS Middleware Server

Read more about Load Balancer with IFS Middleware Server