A single firewall or cluster of firewalls with a public IP address is
interfaced to an internet public subnet to receive service requests for a
cluster of network servers. A first private subnet with a plurality of
private IP addresses is interfaced to the single firewall or cluster of
firewalls to receive the service requests after passing through a
firewall. A plurality of redundant load balancers with a respective
plurality of private IP addresses are interfaced to the first private
subnet to receive the service requests after passing through the first
private subnet. The load balancers are interfaced to a second private
subnet. The network servers with respective private IP addresses are
interfaced to the second private subnet to receive the service requests
from the load balancers. At an initialization time, a private IP address
is defined for the network load balancer system within the internet
access subnet. When one of the load balancers becomes primary at the
initialization time or switches from a standby state to an active state,
the network load balancer system private IP address is defined as an
alias in an interface table to be recognized by the one load balancer.
When the one network load balancer switches from the active state to a
standby state, the network load balancer system private IP address
previously defined as the alias is released from the interface table.