What can I say? Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager (previously know as Zeus Traffic Manager)  is probably one of the best Load Balancers I’ve tested on the market, now it’s also available as VMware OVF format.

From initial VM OVF deployment to the actual implementation of the first load balanced web sites was less than 30 minutes. Simple concept and solid performance during stress tested (concurrent over 10,000 users per seconds).

I particularly like the admin GUI, simple and intuitive, everything is self explanatory and no non-sense.

What’s best, it also comes with an integrated Application Firewall as well as Traffic Manager Cluster Mode which you can add one or more Traffic Managers to the cluster to make it HA, wow, this idea is brilliant!

I’ve even gone as far as adding the 3rd TM (on a different subnets) into the cluster, it worked somehow, but failed when creating a Traffic IP as the Traffic IP must be seen on all subnet, I think this can be easily solved using a router between the two different subnets thought. Alternatively, I think GSLB is my next option on the list, but don’t have time now, will try later.

The most magical feature is Aptimizer which transparently optimize your web page (ie, compressed, hence reduced the time for loading) without you rewrite any of the coding.

Stingray Aptimizer is what was formerly known as Website Accelerator, or WAX. It was created by New Zealand software developer Aptimize to rejigger and accelerate web pages running on IIS or Apache web servers as well as pages stored on content delivery networks from Akamai Technologies.

Aptimizer analyzes how web pages load and reorganizes the content so a web browser doesn’t have to make so many roundtrips back to the web server to load a page. Because there are dozens of elements on a typical page, reconfiguring the web pages on the fly and storing the more efficient web page in cache on the web server can reduce page load times by a factor of four. The beauty is that this optimization does not change the web applications one bit, so you don’t have to modify your code.

The only complain is probably the cost, which is prohibitive to implement for the average SMBs, but since Riverbed is really targeting enterprise market, so I guess they don’t really care about the little ones after all.

Oh…there is a free and fully functional with limited features (10 request per second) Developer edition, don’t forget to try it out.