Patent attributes
A transparent load balancer receives incoming Ethernet frames having incoming source and destination IP and MAC addresses. The load balancer diverts the incoming frames to one of several multi-application platforms. The incoming frames are communicated across a first TCP connection that terminates on a multi-application platform. The first TCP connection is defined by TCP source and destination ports. The transparent load balancer receives outgoing frames from the multi-application platform and outputs the outgoing frames with source and destination IP and MAC addresses that are identical to the incoming source and destination IP and MAC addresses. The outgoing frames are communicated across a second TCP connection, the second TCP connection being defined by the same TCP source port and TCP destination port of the first TCP connection. The transparent load balancer and multi-application platforms can be inserted into a running network without noticeable interruption to devices on the network.
