OK, this one is about speeds for load balancers.  Or firewalls for that matter. Don’t get completely caught up in the maximum throughput and concurrent session numbers.  Remember to fully investigate the connections per second (CPS) or new flows data under a variety of enabled features.  Sure a box can pass 900Mbits/sec when it is 20 high-speed flows and there are minimal rules enabled.  But how many new connections can it process and build state tables for under your configuration requirements.  The file size requested in those new connections will also have a drastic effect. You might find products handing only 4000 up to 400,000.

Nearly all web acceleration features of load balancers can be done on your web server, but they do give you a single, hardware-enabled place to do it.  Browser supported compression such as gzip is a nice feature because there’s no additional hit to your web servers. You also get many other options based on content  type and sometimes even speed of remote client.  Caching control transparently enhances remote browser handling of images while freeing staff from maintaining cache headers for all images.  Finally, even TCP flow enhancements are more easily handled (sometimes with more options) on an appliance than tuning the OS of your web servers.

The Cisco ACE module and appliance deliver very advanced hardware virtualization.  Each virtual Application Controller Engine is called a context, which is configured by naming it, assigning VLAN interfaces, and defining resource restrictions.

context name
 allocate-interface vlan vlan or range
 member resource-class-name

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