N10-009 Question 17
Single answer1.2 Compare and contrast networking appliances, applications, and functions.A company hosts a public e-commerce website in its data center. During seasonal sales, the web application remains online, but users report slow page loads and intermittent timeouts. Monitoring shows that no single web server is overloaded, yet inbound HTTPS sessions are unevenly distributed across the server farm. The network administrator wants to improve application availability and distribute client requests more evenly without changing the application code. Which solution should be implemented?
- A
Deploy a load balancer in front of the web servers
- B
Install a proxy server on each web server
- C
Replace the edge router with a multilayer switch
- D
Implement a VPN concentrator for incoming customer traffic
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is to deploy a load balancer. Network+ objectives for networking appliances and functions include understanding when to use devices such as load balancers, proxies, VPN concentrators, routers, and multilayer switches. In a real-world web farm, a load balancer sits in front of multiple servers and presents a single virtual service to clients while distributing requests according to a balancing method and server health status. This directly addresses the scenario's symptoms: the application is available, individual servers are not overloaded, but client sessions are not being spread evenly. Vendor and industry documentation for application delivery controllers and load balancers consistently identifies traffic distribution, health checks, session persistence, and high availability as standard capabilities for this use case.
- A. Correct.
Correct. A load balancer is designed to distribute client sessions across multiple backend servers, improving availability, scalability, and performance. In this scenario, the issue is uneven distribution of HTTPS requests across the web farm. A load balancer can use algorithms such as round robin, least connections, or weighted balancing to spread traffic more evenly, and many platforms also provide health checks so failed servers are removed from rotation automatically.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A proxy server intermediates requests between clients and servers, but installing a proxy on each web server does not address the core need to distribute inbound client sessions across the server farm. Candidates may choose this because proxies can affect traffic flow, caching, or filtering, but that is not the same as balancing production web traffic across multiple application nodes.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A multilayer switch can perform switching and routing functions, typically within a LAN, but replacing the edge router with one would not solve uneven HTTPS session distribution among multiple web servers. This option is plausible because multilayer switches can improve internal network performance, but they are not the appropriate appliance for application-layer traffic distribution to a server pool in this scenario.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A VPN concentrator is used to aggregate and manage secure remote-access or site-to-site VPN tunnels. It is not intended to distribute public customer web sessions across application servers. Someone might select this option because it handles many simultaneous connections, but those connections are encrypted tunnels for remote access, not balanced HTTPS application traffic for an e-commerce site.