A method for providing load balancing to a client node external to a clustered environment for storage management, includes deploying a lightweight load balancing component at the client node, receiving I/O requests issued by virtual machines hosted at the client node by the lightweight load balancing component, performing a hashing algorithm on content of the I/O requests by the lightweight load balancing component to identify one or more controller virtual machines at the clustered environment for handling the I/O requests and dynamically distributing the I/O requests from the lightweight load balancing component to the one or more controller virtual machines at the clustered environment for storage management.