Hardware load balancers are specifically designed to provide the best load balancing based on the task they are intended to address. Remember that there are very different roles for hardware load balancers, at Kemp Technologies we produce Server Load Balancer hardware appliances as well as virtual server load balancers.
At this point it is a good idea to look at the Kemp Technologies hardware load balancers.
One of the key reasons that many of our users decide on our hardware load balancers is that they are dedicated to the load balancing task and cannot be impacted by other applications and processes that are running on the server itself.
Secondly hardware load balancers, for example the LoadMaster 2600, 3600 and 5300 have SSL offload and optimization ASIC processors on board that are perfect for ensuring top class performance is ensured. With hardware load balancers performance and capacity can be specified in black and white with a virtual load balancer these metrics are variable and depend on how the virtual machine is configured and how much CPU is allocated.