Barracuda Load Balancer 340 Review
Posted by Sam
Last week I tried out the Barracuda 340 Load Balancer. In more informal conversations (is that possible?) I've been referring to the Barracuda as the Barracrappy because that's the impression I was left with. A few weeks ago our Cisco LocalDirector died a sad and lonely death in our NetStandard data center. The LocalDirector had been working flawlessly for better than five years without a single problem and then one day it dies with very little warning. Nothing lasts forever so this wasn't shocking, but it was unexpected. Once the painful recovery process was over I immediately began looking at alternatives. Of course I'd love to go with a BIG-IP, but the cost really isn't reasonable and frankly most of the features are unnecessary for our needs. And so began the search for an inexpensive solution that would be a drop in replacement for the LocalDirector.
After a lot of searching I had basically narrowed down the search to the Barracuda 340 Load Balancer and the Kemp LoadMaster 1500. Both said they would do Layer 4 switching, which I needed so that we could simply drop in the load balancer and have it behave the same as the LocalDirector did. Having to re-ip all the boxes would be a pain and highly disruptive and I really didn't see the benefit. After looking at screenshots and demos I settled on the Barracuda. The price was excellent and as an added bonus it had Intrusion Prevention System which certainly isn't a necessity, but more of a bonus. The other deciding factor was the Barracuda name. I'd never used their products before but I'd heard of them and I like their philosophy on always reaching a human on the phone. So I set out to order the Barracuda 340.
I had a couple problems getting the demo unit from Barracuda. First, I talked to a guy at Barracuda who took my info and was supposed to pass it along to a reseller. I let him know that we were replacing a busted load balancer and I was in a hurry. A full day passed and I didn't hear anything, so I called Barracuda again and talked to somebody else who gave me the information for a reseller nearby and this got the ball rolling. I cut a PO to the reseller who promised to have the unit overnighted. The next day I found out that Barracuda had shipped the load balancer through normal shipping instead of the overnight shipping I'd requested and paid for. So we waited another day for Barracuda to ship another one, overnight this time. Unfortunately, this was only the beginning of the problems. And if this had been the most problematic part of the ordeal it wouldn't have been a big deal.
The demo unit finally arrived, but it was shipped to the wrong person in the company. After I tracked down the unit we immediately went to work to get it configured. My expectation was that we'd simply plug it in, turn it on and after 15-20 minutes of configuration we'd have a load balancer passing traffic. Boy was I wrong! Having configured the LocalDirector through the command line for years I expected the web interface that came with the Barracuda to be a cake walk and it mostly was, except for the fact that it didn't work. We tried everything and I mean everything to get it to work. Finally we called tech support. This really shouldn't have been necessary because like I said it should have been dead simply. After waiting for at least 4 hours for tech support to call me back they finally did, but because I had left for the day I had to have them call me back the next day. Once they called me back I told them what I was trying to do and the guy told me that was impossible in the current setup and when I protested he realized that I had a load balancer and not whatever the heck he thought I had. Somebody else had entered the trouble ticket and they entered it wrong so he was working with faulty information. Grrrr. He transfered me to somebody that can trouble shoot a load balancer. Good call!
Once, I got on the phone with the correct person I was hoping that he'd have some simple solution to our problem. It seems like such a simple thing. The load balancer acts as a bridge, watches the traffic and intercepts and rewrites the traffic it's supposed to handle. I explain our set up to the guy and immediately he grills me on why I'm using Layer 4 load balancing. I explain our setup and that I don't want to re-ip our setup and their instructions on setting up direct server return were less than helpful. And to top it all off they only covered making the changes to Linux. I have happily left the days of Linux behind and we are nearly completely Solaris and Windows. I'd love to leave Windows behind as well but that's currently not an option since our biggest hosting client has to run on Windows. So the direct server return route didn't seem like a viable option and source natting (snat) was definitely out. So I explained most of this and basically told the guy this is how I want it to work, your web site said it will, let's get it working.
The support guy asks all the usual questions and then realizes that our firmware and energize versions are out of date. Energize is the updates for intrusion prevention. Since we have that disabled I'm pretty sure that's not the problem, but the firmware update definitely couldn't hurt. Because we have this on an isolated network (two laptops, two switches and the Barracuda) we have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get this connected to the network. We finally get it setup and update the firmware and the energize versions and try our load balancing setup again. This time it works. Hurray! Unfortunately, that's the last of the good news.
After a couple of minutes of passing traffic through the virtual IP address the load balancer just completely stopped passing traffic for that virtual IP. There was nothing in the logs and no clues to be found. We added a second virtual IP address going to the same two real machines and the same thing happened. It passed traffic for a few minutes and then stopped. We tried a third virtual IP address going to same physical machines and this one worked and seemed to keep on working. I tried deleting the other virtual IP addresses and re-adding the virtual IP addresses and they wouldn't pass traffic to save the world. At this point I was so frustrated with this box and I had zero confidence that I immediately boxed it up and sent it back. When something just doesn't work it's one thing, but when it selectively works that's a very disconcerting thing. Like I said I had zero confidence that this would perform correctly in production and a poorly behaving load balancer is worse than no load balancer.
After packing up the Barracrappy, um I mean Barracuda load balancer I got in touch with my second choice Kemp Technologies' LoadMaster. I'm currently in the process of ordering one and once I've had a chance to play with it I will share my thoughts on it. Hopefully it will be a better experience than the Barracuda load balancer. It certainly couldn't be much worse.
Tags: loadbalancer
Comments
3 months later Joseph Spenner said
How does the Kemp load balancer work? I too have a Barracuda, and have experienced similar issues as you. I'm considering switching to something more stable.
3 months later Sam Freiberg said
@Joseph - Since you asked I decided to write up my thoughts on the Kemp. Short answer is that it is much more solid than the Barracuda. You can read the longer answer here - http://www.darkaslight.com/blog/entry/30-Kemp-Load-Master-1500-Review.
11 months later malcolm said
The Barracuda and the Kemp are both based on LVS (Linux virtual server). The Barracuda has rubish hardware and rubish support but is very cheap and mostly works. The kemp has rubish hardware 1500 + some much better hardware, and more tested software but still very minimal. Loadbalancer.org (shamless plug) has much better hardware even in the cheapest units, great support, full root access and much more flexibility... Citrix and F5 kick but with all of these solutions at a price :-). Interesting performance comparison of the Kemp 1500 verses Loadbalancer.org R16 here : http://www.loadbalancer.org/whyr16.html