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 servers for high availability and failover protection, not for dynamically distributing active traffic load across multiple nodes in response to increased demand.

Virtual switching operates at the network layer to connect VMs within a hypervisor environment and has no direct effect on distributing application-layer web traffic load.

A load balancer sits in front of the web server pool and intelligently distributes client requests across all available servers using algorithms such as round-robin or least-connections. This prevents any one VM from being overwhelmed and directly addresses the problem of increased web traffic causing excessive load on individual servers.

Site mirroring replicates content to another location for redundancy or geographic distribution but does not dynamically balance user requests across servers to reduce per-server load.