[Asterisk-Users] load balancing 20 asterisk servers

[Matthew Boehm]

I've read several other emails and pages on the wiki but none give any
deffinate answers. if you have 20 asterisk servers each with 4 pri's, all
running RealTime Extensions and RealTime SIPBuddies from the same MySQL
server, what prevents you from putting all 20 servers behind a single load
balancer? That way all of your UA's can use the same IP to register to; vs
maintaining which customer is assigned to which machine.

perhaps its just that i am not that familiar with load balancers. i was
under the impression that a load balancer could/would send each recieved
packet to a different server.
this doesn't matter in the case of register requests since all asterisk
boxes share same SIP registry database.

but what about invite requests and the rtp stream? you would have a majorly
broken conversation if each packet in the rtp stream went to a different
asterisk box.

or are load balancers SIP aware? or is there some sort of session control
that the balancer is aware of and will send all packets in a "sip session"
to the same asterisk box?

and then what about meet me conferences? if 10 UA's all dial a conference
DID number and all 10 get balanced to 10 different servers then they are all
sitting in seperate rooms right?

hints, opinions, facts...all welcome and appreciated.

-Matthew