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Quick about the difference : Load Balancing Vs Load Sharing

 Today we are going to talk about the difference between Load Balancing and Load Sharing. I talked about Load Balancing and its method’s Static and Dynamic in my earlier article. Here in this article I am going to talk about the main difference between Load Balancing and Load Sharing.

Load Balancing
In general if we talk about Load Balancing, It distributing the Network traffic or load evenly across multiple paths and can be attainable with Static and Dynamic Load Balancing. Load Balancing generally works on the concept of distribution of the traffic across the links.

As we discussed, It works on the formation of Ratios, Round robin, Fastest, Least connections, observed methods.


Load Sharing
If we talk about the Load sharing, It is sending some percentage of the traffic or load to one link in the network while some traffic percentage will be passed through other links. Make sure you understand the difference as It doesn't have to be equal. Load Sharing generally works on the concept of splitting of the traffic across the links.

Load Sharing works on the concept of the destination IP or MAC address decisions to share the traffic or network load across the links.


Conclusion
Load sharing is precisely more precise terminology, in that traffic is shared across multiple paths even if in a unequal fashion. If you were to look at two comparing traffic graphs, with load balancing the two graphs should be near identical, but in reality with load sharing they might be similar but the traffic flow pattern would be different.

Note: Additional very significant information to retain that any load-sharing/load-balancing configurations are UNI-directional, manipulating traffic in one direction. If the incoming traffic had to be balanced in the same method, the same configuration would be required in the opposite direction.