CompTIA Cloud+ Practice Test

What is a potential solution to help scale a web server farm for additional workload?

1. Vertical scaling

2. Disk cloning

3. Service consolidation

4. Load balancing

The correct answer is: Vertical scaling

In the context of scaling a web server farm to handle additional workload, the best approach among the provided options is load balancing. Load balancing helps distribute incoming network traffic across multiple servers effectively, ensuring that no single server becomes overwhelmed with requests. This improves responsiveness and availability, as it can manage a larger volume of connections and requests by spreading the workload evenly. Vertical scaling, or scaling up, involves adding more resources (such as CPU, RAM, or storage) to an existing server, which can increase the capacity of a single instance but may lead to limitations as there’s a maximum capacity for given hardware. It is often seen as a temporary solution since it does not inherently provide redundancy or failover capabilities. Disk cloning is primarily a method for creating exact copies of server setups or for backup purposes, and does not address workload scaling. Service consolidation refers to combining multiple services or applications onto fewer servers. While it can enhance efficiency, it does not directly facilitate increasing the overall capacity to handle more load as effectively as load balancing does. Thus, load balancing stands out as the most effective solution for scaling a web server farm to accommodate additional workloads.