First I will discuss the theory of load balancers and then give a practical demonstration of how they work.

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Jeff Silverman is a Network Support Engineer at F5 Networks. He is fully qualified on the Local Traffic Manager, which is F5’s load balancer offering. He is also qualifying on enterprise manager, which is a tool to manage large numbers (>10) local traffic managers. Jeff used to be a Linux system administrator at Real Networks. Prior to that, he was a Java developer and sysadmin at the UW college of Forest Resources (see http://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/fera/fccs/). He was the system administrator for Research Computing Systems at the UW Electrical Engineering department. He was the MS-Windows sysadmin, UNIX sysadmin, and release engineer for Mathsoft (now Insightful). He has patent 5,296,853, for an icing detector for aircraft. His favorite linux distribution is Ubuntu but he uses Red Hat Fedora at work. Jeff is married with 4 children, 3 grandchildren, and 1 more grandchild due in April.