Load balancing Qumulo Hybrid File System
Updated on November 19, 2025
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Published on March 7, 2023
Benefits of load balancing Qumulo Hybrid File System
The top three benefits of load balancing in a Qumulo distributed file system environment are:
- Enhanced performance and scalability: Load balancing, often implemented via a smart DNS service or Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) for Qumulo, ensures that client connections are distributed across all healthy nodes in the cluster. This prevents any single node from becoming a bottleneck, leading to optimized resource utilization and consistent performance by preventing “hot spots” (overburdened nodes).
- High Availability (HA): By sitting in front of the Qumulo cluster, the load balancer acts as a gatekeeper that constantly monitors the health of all participating nodes. If a node becomes unresponsive or fails a health check, the load balancer stops directing new client connections to it. This ensures that service remains uninterrupted for users, as traffic is immediately rerouted to the remaining healthy nodes. Administrators can also take a node offline for maintenance (e.g., hardware upgrades or patching) without impacting client access, as the load balancer will simply remove it from the distribution pool until it’s back online and healthy.
- Simplified management and growth: Integrating load balancing simplifies the operational complexity often associated with large-scale, distributed storage. When new nodes are added to the Qumulo cluster to increase capacity or performance, the load balancer can be quickly configured to include them in the distribution pool, allowing the cluster to scale without disruptive reconfiguration on the client side. Users and applications connect to a single, unified address (the load balancer’s DNS name), making the underlying multi-node architecture transparent. This simplifies client configuration and provides a consistent point of access across a growing infrastructure.
About Qumulo Hybrid File System
Qumulo is the leader in Hybrid Cloud File Storage, providing real-time visibility, scale and control of your data across on-premises and cloud. Qumulo’s real-time analytics enable you to understand your storage at a granular level, detect bottlenecks and accelerate performance. Built to scale across data center and cloud, Qumulo lets you programmatically configure and manage usage, capacity and performance. Qumulo’s innovative approach continuously delights customers with new capabilities, 100% usable capacity and direct access to experts.
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How to load balance Qumulo Hybrid File System
Load balancing a Qumulo deployment requires no Virtual Services (VIPs). Instead, both load balancers are configured as smart DNS name servers for the FQDN of the Qumulo cluster address in question (qumulo.company.com in this guide). This is achieved using the load balancer’s built-in GSLB service and by using DNS delegation.
The GSLB service uses weighted round-robin load balancing to distribute inbound client connections across the healthy Qumulo nodes. The weights for the nodes can be set as required depending on relative node performance.
Ports used by the appliance
| Protocol | Port | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| TCP | 22 | SSH |
| TCP & UDP | 53 | DNS/GSLB |
| TCP & UDP | 123 | NTP |
| TCP & UDP | 161 | SNMP |
| UDP | 6694 | Heartbeat between Primary & Secondary appliances in HA mode |
| TCP | 7778 | HAProxy persistence table replication |
| TCP | 9000 | Gateway service (Centralized/Portal Management) |
| TCP | 9080 | WebUI – HTTP (disabled by default) |
| TCP | 9081 | Nginx fallback page |
| TCP | 9443 | WebUI – HTTPS |
| TCP | 25565 | Shuttle service (Centralized/Portal Management) |
Load balancing Qumulo Hybrid File System
The diagram below illustrates how the load balancer is deployed. The client sends a DNS query for the service FQDN, e.g. qumulo.company.com to the local DNS server.
The local DNS server has the sub domain delegated to both load balancers (both load balancers are configured as name servers for the sub domain). One of the load balancers receives the delegated DNS query. The load balancer selects a healthy Qumulo node based on the GSLB health checks and the round robin algorithm used.
The load balancer returns the IP address of the selected Qumulo node to the DNS server. The DNS server returns the IP address of the selected Qumulo node to the client. The client connects directly to the Qumulo node.
