BalanceNG V6 Certified

BalanceNG is self-sufficient and lightweight. It does not depend on third party packages or kernel modules other than the Linux operating system itself. Just install BalanceNG on the Linux distribution of your choice (and the hypervisor of your choice) and you are ready to go.

A BalanceNG session table entry consumes 256 bytes. Calculating with that, 1GB of main memory can store over 4 million session table entries. This gets you free from any Linux OS dependencies. With BalanceNGs session table synchronisation protocol bngsync (registered port 10439) the session table contents are reliably synchronised between VRRP master and backup. In case of a failover an open TCP connection just continues. 

The BalanceNG packet processing engine is multithreaded by design and gives you the freedom to scale up following increasing traffic and bandwidth requirements. On suitable hardware this allows to almost saturate a 10GbE connection.

By systematically following rolling releases of modern “upfront” Linux distributions like Fedora we constantly verify that BalanceNG is ready for upcoming LTS and production RHEL releases. Thus we consider BalanceNG “RHEL10-ready”, being an unofficial label of course.

The packet processing is fully handled by BalanceNG itself, covering everything necessary (IPv4, IPv6, ARP, ND6, TCP, UDP, VRRP2, VRRP3 and so on). This is independent from the Linux IP stack, the Linux NICs just have to be UP and connected. The MAC addresses that BalanceNG uses on the wire are either VRRP standard addresses (for the virtual servers and other shared addresses) or automatically generated from the registered MAC address range pool (MA-L  34-38-AF) which appears as “Inlab Networks” with Wireshark, for example.