Often, computing resources and services are provided by a number of computing systems. These computing resources and/or services may be consumed by a number of additional computing systems. In many cases, several computing systems will provide access to the same resource or service. Each of the computing systems that provide the resource or service is typically limited in the number of requests that the system can process during a period of time.
To help provision services to the requesting computer systems, some enterprises utilize a centralized system that can track the usage of each system providing a service or resource. By using the centralized system, the load on each of the provisioning systems can be balanced among the several computing systems that provide the service or resource. One such centralized system is a hardware load balancer. A hardware load balancer can help distribute requests among computing systems that provide a service or resource thereby balancing the load across the provisioning systems of an enterprise.