Patent ID: 8156504

Claim:
A system, comprising: a first physical device that provides a secure sockets layer (SSL) termination resource, the first physical device having a first SSL processing context running actively thereon, the first SSL processing context having the SSL termination resource allocated to it on the first physical device; a second physical device that also provides the SSL termination resource, the second physical device having a second SSL processing context running actively thereon, the second SSL processing context having the SSL termination resource allocated to it on the second physical device; and a server load balancer (SLB) context adapted to run in active mode on the first physical device and to run in standby mode on the second physical device to balance a workload associated with the SSL termination resource between the first SSL processing context and the second SSL processing context, wherein the SLB context concurrently allocates a first portion of the workload to the first SSL processing context and a second portion of the workload to the second SSL processing context that are created between the first physical device and the second physical device, the first SSL context runs in active mode in the first physical device and in standby mode in the second physical device while the second SSL context runs in active mode in the second physical device and in standby mode in the first physical device so that the first and second portions of the workload are processed concurrently at the first SSL processing context and the second SSL processing context respectively.