How to set up DNS load balancing in clustered Data ONTAP
Applies to
- CMODE
- Clustered Data ONTAP 8
- Setup Configuration
Description
Domain Name System (DNS) load balancing is a method by which administrators can be sure that clients accessing vServer data LIFs are accessing them in a manner that does not overload individual lifs.
The following two methods can be performed:
- Round Robin DNS (External DNS configuration)
- On-Box DNS load balancing (Available in clustered Data ONTAP 8.1 and later)
With On-Box DNS, conditional forwarders or delegations can be leveraged.
A forwarder is a DNS server on a network used to forward DNS queries for external DNS names to DNS servers outside that network. You can also forward queries according to specific domain names using conditional forwarders.
A conditional forwarder is a DNS server on a network that is used to forward DNS queries according to the DNS domain name in the query. For example, a DNS server can be configured to forward all the queries it receives for names ending with widgets.example.com
to the IP address of a specific DNS server, or to the IP addresses of multiple DNS servers.
DNS delegation *must* be used if configuring a vServer to use a DNS domain that is in the same tree as an existing zone.
For example, if you want to use cmode.netapp.com
in my domain netapp.com
, you can use a DNS delegation.