A hosting company provides 10 VM web servers for a financial institution. The financial institution recently introduced a new web application and now their web traffic has significantly increased…

Clustering groups multiple servers to work as a single system, often for high availability or specific computational tasks, but it does not inherently distribute incoming web traffic as effectively as a dedicated load balancer does for web applications.

Virtual switching is a component within a hypervisor that connects virtual machines to each other and to physical networks; it is a fundamental networking infrastructure component and not a solution for distributing web application load to reduce server burden.

Load balancing distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers, preventing any single server from becoming a bottleneck and improving overall application availability and responsiveness. By implementing a load balancer, the significantly increased web traffic can be evenly distributed among the 10 VM web servers, effectively reducing the load on individual servers and improving performance.

Site mirroring creates an exact copy of a website or server for disaster recovery or to serve content from geographically closer locations, but its primary function is data replication and availability, not active traffic distribution to reduce the processing load on existing web servers.