SMG Integration with CAS

[Sulman Mushtaq Mushtaq Hussain]

Hi All, I have SMG which I will integrate with 2 CAS appliances from symantec which is doing advanced analysis and sandboxing. I will add both of these 2 CAS appliances on SMG with same priority/preference to have load balancing. My questions are below.

1) How SMG would determine whether it should forward the email to CAS-1 or CAS-2? Does it have some internal load balancing algorithm that will determine this? or SMG will sand it randomly to either CAS-1 or CAS-2 which are with same priorities?

2) Should I use load balancing on SMG for both CAS appliances with same priority ? or should I use failover for CAS appliances with different priorities? what is recommended to do?

Appreciate your comments. Thanks


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Symantec Enthusiast
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[James Martini]

The CAS servers of equal priority are load balanced via round robin selection with some additional logic to balance connection pools. The load balancing does, however, retain an affinity for a particular CAS server on a per message basis meaning that we will attempt to pass all CAS scannable objects in one message to a single CAS server if possible. Lower priority CAS servers should only be used when the higher priority servers are either inaccessible or cannot accept new transactions.