| dc.description.abstract | Service load balancers are critical components in modern data centers. Load balancers aim to split the traffic of services evenly among servers. Traditional load balancers are dedicated devices for load balancing, but the cost is unacceptable to many data centers. As a result, software load balancers are chosen as an alternative. However, software load balancers run on servers, and while cost less in licensing, running load balancing with CPU is inefficient resulting low throughput. Recently, Duet cite{Gandhi2014} utilizes tunneling technique and switches in data centers as low-cost load balancers. However, DUET has the problem of inefficiency using non-optimal routes. Since in most data centers, the oversubscription ratio is not 1:1, it is of particular importance to avoid unnecessary bandwidth usage. We present ECMP Static Route (ESR) in this paper. ESR is a hybrid method combining switch functionalities and server software to form a load balancing system, having the benefit of high performance, optimal routing path, and low cost. We reuse the ECMP functionality in switches to provide load balancing. Our design provides a complete solution including load balancing and failure recovery. We implemented ESR in Cisco Virtual Internet Routing Lab to prove the feasibility of the idea. Also, we used OMNeT++ to evaluate the performance of the system. The evaluation shows that our method has 1/3 improvement in flow completion time. | en_US |