Balancing workload distributed between nodes in a cluster through allocations of IP addresses by determining, for each node, an imbalance metric for each possible pairing of the plurality of an IP address assignable to the node based upon the distances between the IP addresses in each pairing and selectively distributing a plurality of IP addresses between the nodes in a cluster based upon minimizing the sum of the imbalance metrics of the IP addresses for each of the nodes in the cluster resulting from the selected distribution.