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Round Robin DNS Load Balancing

Published: Thursday, May 20, 2004

How DNS load balancing works

When the request comes to the DNS server to resolve the domain name, it
gives out one of the several canonical names in a rotated order. This
redirects the request to one of the several servers in a server group. Once
the BIND feature of DNS resolves the domain to one of the servers,
subsequent requests from the same client are sent to the same server.

DNS load balancing implementation (Multiple CNAMES)

This approach works for BIND 4 name servers, where multiple CNAMES are
not considered as a configuration error. Assuming there are 4 web servers in
the cluster configured with IP addresses 123.45.67.[1-4], add all of them to
the DNS with Address records (A Names) as below. The srv[1-4] can be set
to any name you want, such as foo[1-4], but should match the next step.

srv1 IN A 123.45.67.1
srv2 IN A 123.45.67.2
srv3 IN A 123.45.67.3
srv4 IN A 123.45.67.4

Add the following canonical names to resolve www.domain.com to one of

these servers.

www IN CNAME srv1.domain.tld.

IN CNAME srv2.domain.tld.
IN CNAME srv3.domain.tld.
IN CNAME srv4.domain.tld.

The DNS server will resolve the www.domain.com to one of the listed
servers in a rotated manner. That will spread the requests over the group of
servers.

Note: The requests sent to http://domain.com (without 'www') should be

forwarded to http://www.domain.com in this case to work. For BIND 8 name
servers, the above approach will throw an error for multiple CNAMES. This
can be avoided by an explicit multiple CNAME configuration option as shown
below.

options {
multiple-cnames yes;
};

DNS load balancing implementation (Multiple A Records)

This above approach with multiple CNAMES for one domain name is not a
valid DNS server configuration for BIND 9 and above. In this case, multiple A
records are used.

www.domain.tld. 60 IN A 123.45.67.1
www.domain.tld. 60 IN A 123.45.67.2
www.domain.tld. 60 IN A 123.45.67.3
 www.domain.tld. 60 IN A 123.45.67.4

The TTL value should be kept to a low value, so that the DNS cache is
refreshed faster.

Other considerations

The DNS based load balancing method shown above does not take care of
various potential issues such as unavailable servers (if one server goes
down), or DNS caching by other name servers. The DNS server does not
have any knowledge of the server availability and will continue to point to an
unavailable server. It can only differentiate by IP address, but not by server
port. The IP address can also be cached by other nameservers, hence
requests may not be sent to the load balancing DNS server.

Considering the functionality, the round robin DNS is not a load balancing
mechanism but a load distribution option. Some of these drawbacks can be
overcome by implementing an advanced version of the DNS load balancer
using Perl scripts. The details can be found here.

Some other variety of load balancing can be performed by using a proxy

server, where one of the web servers, is solely used for re-routing of traffic to
the other servers. If Apache is used as a web server, the mod_rewrite
feature of Apache can be used for this purpose as detailed in this Apache
website article.

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