Load Balancing for Education – Getting Started

During the COVID-19 situation I have been doing some consultancy for schools and colleges looking for a bit of help to support the sudden change to remote schooling and teaching. The range of IT infrastructure varies widely and it’s certainly pushed me out of my comfort zone exploring vendors and solutions I’ve not explored before.

In a large further education or community college there is usually already a reasonable degree of server infrastructure in use (Exchange, Sharepoint) and often some cloud-based applications (typically Microsoft 365). The IT teams in such institutions are typically small and multi-skilled often driven by a single system administrator who does most roles from architecture, software patches, crawling under desks to change cables and providing support to reset student or teacher logins.