Kemp Loadmaster
Distribute requests, run health checks and terminate TLS to improve availability.
"For teams needing reliable, scalable application delivery across on‑prem and cloud estates."
Distribute and protect application traffic across hybrid estates
Organisations running business‑critical web or application services need predictable availability and efficient use of server capacity. Traffic spikes, failing backends and heavy TLS processing create load on application servers and increase the risk of outages.
Kemp LoadMaster distributes requests across backend servers using L4 and L7 balancing, runs health checks and performs SSL/TLS termination and content switching. It keeps unhealthy hosts out of rotation, reduces backend CPU for crypto, and provides a single control point to manage how traffic is routed and served.
Where Kemp Loadmaster is used
Use cases include keeping business‑critical web and API services available by distributing traffic and failing over from unhealthy backends. Teams also use LoadMaster to offload SSL/TLS from application servers to reduce backend resource use and simplify traffic handling.
Organisations deploy LoadMaster to scale services during demand peaks and to route requests by host or URL to the right backend pools, improving response times and service resilience.
Fits within these solutions
Delivery & deployment
Suitable environments
Fits on‑prem and virtualised estates as well as hybrid and multi‑cloud environments. Commonly used by IT teams running VMware or similar virtual platforms, and by managed service or hosting providers delivering multi‑tenant application services.
Benefits
Improved availability
Reduce downtime by distributing requests and failing over from unhealthy backends.
Reduced backend load
Offload TLS and balance traffic to lower CPU and memory pressure on application servers.
Faster response
Route traffic to healthy, appropriate servers to improve response times for users.
Simplified TLS
Centralise TLS termination to simplify certificate handling and renewals at the delivery point.
Predictable scaling
Use balanced distribution to make capacity consumption more predictable during peaks.
Operational simplicity
Centralise traffic routing rules and health logic to reduce per‑server configuration overhead.
Capabilities
Traffic distribution
Layer 4 balancing
Layer 7 routing
Health checks
SSL/TLS termination
Content switching
Optimise delivery
Applications
High‑availability apps
Keep business‑critical web and API services available by spreading load and failing over unhealthy hosts.
Scale for peaks
Absorb demand spikes by distributing requests across available capacity to maintain performance.
Virtualised estates
Deploy in VMware and other virtual platforms to load balance services running on VMs.
Hybrid and multi‑cloud
Route traffic across on‑prem and cloud backends to support hybrid application architectures.
Service provider delivery
Used by hosting and managed service providers to present resilient application endpoints to customers.
SSL offload
Offload TLS processing from legacy or resource‑constrained servers to improve capacity and latency.