N10-009 Question 19
Single answerA company hosts a customer-facing web application on four identical virtual servers in its data center. During peak usage, users report slow response times, and when one web server fails, active sessions are dropped and users must log in again. The network team wants to improve availability and distribute client traffic more evenly without changing the application code on each server. Which appliance should be deployed to best meet these requirements?
- A
Load balancer
- B
Intrusion prevention system (IPS)
- C
Proxy server
- D
Network-attached storage (NAS)
Show answer and explanation
Correct answer: A
Explanation
The best answer is a load balancer because the scenario focuses on two classic application delivery requirements: spreading client requests across multiple web servers and maintaining service when one server fails. A load balancer sits in front of the server pool, monitors backend health, and forwards traffic only to available servers. Depending on the platform, it can also provide session persistence, which helps reduce the likelihood of users being forced to log in again after requests are redistributed. This aligns with common vendor and industry best practices for high availability web services, including the use of health checks and persistence policies on application delivery controllers and load balancers. By contrast, an IPS is for inline threat prevention, a proxy is primarily an intermediary for client/server communication and is not the best Network+ answer here, and NAS is a storage appliance unrelated to traffic distribution.
- A. Correct.
Correct. A load balancer is designed to distribute incoming client connections across multiple backend servers, improving performance and availability. Many load balancers also provide health checks to stop sending traffic to failed servers and can support persistence or session affinity so users are less likely to lose sessions when traffic is distributed. This directly addresses uneven traffic distribution and server failure handling for a web application.
- B. Incorrect.
Incorrect. An IPS is a security appliance that inspects traffic for malicious activity and can block or prevent suspected attacks. While it may sit inline with production traffic, it is not intended to distribute application requests across multiple servers or maintain user session continuity for application delivery.
- C. Incorrect.
Incorrect. A proxy server acts as an intermediary for client requests, commonly for content filtering, caching, anonymity, or outbound access control. Although some reverse proxies can perform application delivery functions, the best answer in Network+ terminology for distributing traffic among multiple identical web servers and improving availability is a load balancer, which is purpose-built for this role.
- D. Incorrect.
Incorrect. NAS provides file-level shared storage over the network, typically using protocols such as SMB or NFS. It is used for centralized file storage, not for distributing client web traffic or detecting failed web servers in an application farm.