Chapter 4. The Concepts of Content Switching

Before we look at the applications of content switching, such as server and firewall load balancing, it's important to understand some of the underlying terms and concepts we'll use freely in later chapters. As with all modern networking disciplines, content switching has its own vocabulary. We'll use terms like virtual servers, application redirection , and deep packet inspection to describe the applications, so a good grounding now will aid our understanding later. This chapter will look at each of these terms and concepts in turn as a precursor to more in-depth discussion in later chapters.