N10-009 Question 16
Single answer1.2 Compare and contrast networking appliances, applications, and functions.A company hosts a customer-facing web application in its data center. During seasonal sales, traffic increases sharply and the web servers become overloaded, even though the internet circuit and firewall are not saturated. The network administrator wants to distribute incoming HTTPS sessions across multiple web servers and automatically stop sending traffic to any server that fails a health check. Which solution best meets this requirement?
- A
Deploy a load balancer in front of the web server farm
- B
Replace the firewall with a proxy server
- C
Install a VPN concentrator for remote user access
- D
Add a UTM appliance to consolidate security services
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is to deploy a load balancer. In real-world environments, load balancers are commonly placed in front of a server farm to spread client connections across multiple servers using methods such as round robin, least connections, or weighted distribution. They also commonly support health checks, ensuring failed or degraded servers are removed from service automatically. This aligns with standard industry practice for improving scalability and availability of customer-facing applications. By contrast, proxy servers, VPN concentrators, and UTM appliances serve different primary functions. Network+ objectives expect candidates to distinguish among networking appliances by their operational purpose rather than by broad familiarity with the terms. Vendor documentation from major load-balancing platforms consistently describes traffic distribution and health monitoring as core features.
- A. Correct.
Correct. A load balancer is designed to distribute client requests across multiple backend servers, improving availability and performance. It can also perform health checks and remove failed servers from rotation automatically. In this scenario, that directly addresses the need to balance HTTPS traffic across several web servers and avoid sending traffic to unhealthy nodes.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A proxy server can broker client requests and may provide caching, filtering, or anonymity functions, but replacing a firewall with a proxy does not primarily solve the problem of distributing web application traffic across multiple servers with health-based failover. This option reflects a common misconception that any device handling application traffic can act as a load balancer.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A VPN concentrator is used to terminate and manage large numbers of VPN tunnels for remote access or site-to-site connectivity. It does not distribute inbound HTTPS sessions across internal web servers or perform server health checks for a web farm.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A UTM appliance combines multiple security features such as firewalling, IDS/IPS, content filtering, and sometimes anti-malware into one platform. While useful for security management, a UTM is not the best fit for application-layer traffic distribution and backend server health monitoring in a web farm.