I have implemented load balanced cells on a couple of cloud solutions now but I cant help thinking that load balanced is the wrong word to use.
Redundant yes but load balanced?
Whilst it is true that the network load balancer can balance the network requests across the 2 or more cells from what I've read only one of those cells can actually utilise vCenter and the other cells mearly off load there requests via it at intervals?
This was seen on one of my environments when requests were being made to create new machines and delete them via the VCD interface but a 5 min (300 second) wait time was seen between each set of 2 tasks in vCenter.
What was happening was that the requests were going via the second cell server. The cell server that was NOT listed as the proxy cell server within VCD.
What would then happen would be the requests would be released 2 at a time to vCenter every 300 Seconds.
I finally managed to find some documentation and go through the logs on the 2 cell servers and discovered that the proxy listed cell server is the only one that actually talks to vCenter. The others release requests via it at a time delay.
The only way we could prevent this from happening was to reboot the cell listed as proxy which then failed the role over and the responses would pick up again.
Can anyone confirm this?