Thus, if L7 features are added into the mix, we will either end up with two incomparable workloads or will have to limit the competition to L7 vendors only. In real life, high performance load balancers often receive traffic on Gbit links. We propose to allow such devices in the participant zone. Moreover, these devices should not affect the total price of the equipment under test, provided they do nothing but L2 aggregation. A single L2 aggregation device can be used for both sides if desired.
Participants are responsible for bringing and configuring the aggregation devices.
Minimum number of origin servers To sustain peak request rate generated by N client PCs, we would need to deploy at least N server PCs. However, balancing one or two servers is not very interesting. Thus, for small number of client PCs, we probably want to deploy more servers than peak request rate requires. We need to agree on the minimum number of origin servers that any switch must balance. Four origin servers may be a reasonable minimum.