This recipe created a web server pool that operates in load balancing mode. We could just as easily have put the pool in manual failover mode. To do so, navigate to Services | Load Balancer and click on the edit icon for the server pool we created earlier. On the Edit page, change the Mode to Manual failover. Note that the current pool members will change so only one server remains enabled; the other two will be disabled until the first server goes down.

If the pfSense load balancer proves to be inadequate, you might want to consider installing HAProxy, a third-party package that incorporates the following improvements over the built-in load balancer:

• Support for Access Control Lists (ACLs)
• Logging options
• Support for different load balancing algorithms
• Support for different methods of informing admins that a server is down (for example, email)