The plug and play enterprise hardware load balancer

A hardware load balancer is a dedicated physical appliance that distributes incoming traffic across a pool of backend servers, usually on-premises in your data center. It runs on purpose-built hardware, which gives it consistent performance and a fixed capacity you can plan around. Because the device is dedicated to traffic distribution, its resources are not shared with other applications.

A hardware load balancer sits in front of your servers and receives client requests through a virtual IP address. It forwards each request to an available server, chosen by an algorithm such as round robin or least connections. Health checks keep traffic away from servers that are down. HAProxy ALOHA also terminates SSL/TLS at the appliance, so traffic is decrypted before it reaches your servers.

A hardware load balancer runs on a dedicated physical appliance in your data center, while a virtual load balancer runs as a virtual machine on a hypervisor or in the cloud. Hardware gives you fixed, predictable capacity and physical isolation, which suits on-premises environments and steady, high-volume traffic. If you want the same load balancing without racking a device, the HAProxy ALOHA virtual load balancer offers a virtual option.

HAProxy ALOHA is a load balancer appliance available in two forms, hardware and virtual. As a hardware load balancer, it is a physical device you install in your data center, with Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing and built-in security in a single unit. It ships pre-configured and is managed through a single web interface, so you can deploy it without assembling a load balancer yourself.

HAProxy ALOHA is a load balancer appliance you deploy as a self-contained unit, either as hardware in your data center or as a virtual image. HAProxy Enterprise is the load balancer software you install and run yourself on infrastructure you manage, including virtual machines, containers and Linux software packages. It can also be centrally managed across many instances by the HAProxy Fusion Control Plane, while HAProxy ALOHA is managed on its own as a standalone appliance. Choose HAProxy ALOHA when you want an appliance to deploy and manage as one unit, and choose the HAProxy Enterprise load balancer when you want to run the software yourself and manage many instances centrally.