Products you can load balance

You can apply load balancing to anything with an Internet Protocol (IP) address that's accessible on the Internet. Thus, you can load balance your Rackspace Cloud Servers, as well as any external server or IP address. For example, you can load balance an external mail server, database server, website, or your personal webserver at home. In load balancing terminology, the resources that you can load balance are called nodes.

Adding nodes

When you create a load balancer by using the Cloud Control Panel, you see the Add Nodes is part of the
configuration process, as shown in the following image:

add nodes to load balancer in control panel

Here, you specify the product you want to load balance. You can add an existing Rackspace Cloud Server or an external IP address.

Note that the distance between the node being load balanced and the region of the load balancer can impact the performance of the load balancer. We recommend creating the load balancer in the region that is closest to your external nodes.

For more information, see Load Balancing Internal IPs in the same region.