What is a disadvantage of running a visualized load balancer

Virtualized load balancers are generally less expensive than dedicated hardware appliances because they run on commodity server hardware and eliminate the need for proprietary chassis or specialized line cards.

Hardware load balancers use dedicated ASICs and FPGAs to process packets at wire speed with minimal latency, while virtualized load balancers depend on general-purpose CPU cycles and compete with the hypervisor for compute resources. This software-based packet processing path introduces higher per-packet overhead and lower maximum throughput compared to equivalent hardware appliances under the same traffic load.

Virtualized load balancers can be made highly reliable through hypervisor-level redundancy, live migration, and active-standby clustering, so reliability is not an inherent disadvantage compared to hardware.

Virtualized load balancers fully support high-availability configurations such as active-standby or active-active pairs through both the virtualization platform and the load balancer software itself.