kafka cluster behind a hardware load balancer

If we have a kafka producer connecting to a Kafka cluster behind a hardware
Load Balancer (VIP), will producer be able to send a message to a right
partition ?
Can one of the brokers in a cluster do a broker discovery to forward the
message to ?
I guess my question is whether it makes sense to use a hardware load
balancer at all.

Typical deployment model at our company is to have a pool of machines and
LB decides which machine in a pool would receive a request. Looking to hear
from kafka experts what is the best way of setting up a cluster given that
the cluster has be behind a VIP.

Thanks