Abstract: Methods and systems for load balancing a plurality of entities, such as firewalls, in a network environment are disclosed. In particular, the load balancing of firewalls on a bidirectional traffic path is performed using a single device that controls both incoming and outgoing traffic through the firewalls. The single device may include virtual routers for controlling the bidirectional traffic through the firewalls. A first virtual router may control incoming traffic to the firewalls and the other virtual router may control outgoing traffic to the firewalls. The virtual routers are logical partitions of the device layered on the physical resources of the device. The virtual routers share all or portions of the physical resources of the single device.

Abstract: A system and method provide in-line server health checks to determine server health without having to wait for a next out-of-band polling interval as with conventional methods. By determining server health directly resulting from TCP and HTTP client requests, multiple connection retries on an unavailable server are prevented. The method for providing server health checking of a server in a network includes activating an in-line server health checking mechanism by monitoring a data path of a server as to health status. Results from the health status analysis are ultimately reported to an authority on server health.