((EXCLUSIVE)) Download Kemp Virtual Load Balancer
Florine Nogoda
To maintain optimal application experience and availability, tools that provide administrators with total single pane of glass control are critical. The Kemp 360 suite complements LoadMaster load balancers by enabling proactive monitoring, analytics, reporting and configuration management
Kemp is able to deliver virtual load balancing solutions thanks to its Virtual LoadMaster (VLM) that leverage all the positive aspects of the VMware design ethos. The key benefits of Kemp VLMs for VMware and Hyper-V are:
Kemp provides a product called LoadMaster that provides a load balancer. Load Master is available in physical and virtual appliances. The virtual appliance is also called VLM (Virtual LoadMaster). LoadMaster can be deployed either in On-Prem and in Microsoft Azure. Today I wanted to show you how to deploy a VLM and the first configuration steps.
In part one, we look at how to deploy the free virtual load balancer from an OVF template. We will deploy this to our standalone ESXi 5.5 environment. In the second part of our series, we will configure the load balancer for Exchange 2013.
It will just take a few moments for the Kemp Load Balancer to boot. When fully booted, you will see an LB100 login prompt. On this same screen, the load balancer will indicate what IP it has obtained. It will also display the default username and password (bal / 1fourall). You will use this information to log into the web portal, where we will complete the initial configuration.
Super simple to deploy and configure the appliance. Download an OVF from freeloadbalancer.com and import it into your vSphere environment. From there, configure some basic settings like IP Address through the console.
Open up a web browser and navigate to our VIP. You can see from the screenshot below that I can navigate to the VIP and get either of the two Web Servers depending on how the load balancer re-directs us.
One challenge you could face when using load balancers on a RARP enabled port group or vSwitch is, all inbound traffic could be passed to one real server, potentially overloading the real server and reducing the workload to a single point of failure. There could also be complications to High available (HA) KEMP configurations, preventing LoadMasters from communicating correctly and failing over from the Active to Passive node.
Edit distributed port group
- Edit security, Forged Transmits set to AcceptForged transmits set to Accept
- Edit Teaming and Failover, Set Notify switches to NoSet notify switch to No
- Click OK to finish.
LoadMaster simplifies secure application delivery for Azure in a virtual appliance that integrates load balancing, security, traffic management and visibility. Whether deploying modern Kubernetes apps, consolidating APIs or delivering web applications, LoadMaster offers the best value with a deep set of capabilities.
I'm aware I could use HAProxy or nginx for load-balancing, been there done that, but I wanted to do things a little differently. For load-balancing, I used Kemp Virtual Load Masters.Of course, we have two so that if the primary VIP fails we can use the secondary. For the heck of it I setup Kemp 360 Central to manage these load-balancers more efficiently.
The load-balancers are also tasked with calculating the member with the best response time in addition to increasing the weight of that member. This means, only the fastest Pi-Hole will be chosen and consistently will have queries sent to it. For members with a lower weight they aren't sent much traffic, but only in the event the primary member fails.
Oh and yes, these nxfilter instances sit behind a VIP on the load-balancers in which the Pi-Hole instances have set as their DNS servers. These are load-balanced the exact way the Pi-Hole instances are. We have 3 of these all placed on physically separate devices. If these were to fail we wouldn't be able to query anything.
Your "email.company.com" DNS record should point to the External Address which NATs to your internal VIP of the load balancers. Each Load Balancer should have it's own IP (the load balancer IPs and VIP should be in a DMZ for security). You should have both your CAS servers added as Real Servers which should be added to your Virtual Services for the VIP. You should have a Virtual Service on your VIP for both port 80 (redirect) and port 443 (directs to CAS Servers). If your kemps are in a DMZ and being routed in a "one arm" configuration, you should also have the "Enable Non-Local Real servers" setting in L7 Config set to Yes
LogicMonitor includes support for monitoring load balancers from Kemp Technologies. We include LogicModules out-of-the-box that monitor critical Kemp Technologies performance metrics to build out dashboards that show the data critical to your IT Operations.
Virtual LoadMaster is a full-featured Layer 4 to Layer 7 (L4-L7) load balancer and Web Application Firewall. It can be configured to work with a diverse collection of workloads such as Microsoft IIS, Apache, Always On VPN, VDI, RDS, and much more. These capabilities can be helpful right now for e-commerce sites that need to deal with increased traffic, educational institutions that need to load balance the traffic generated by students accessing educational software, or corporations that need to load balance their VPN traffic.
Typically, when I write a product review, I try to deploy and configure the product without referring to the documentation. That way, I can get a feel for how intuitive the deployment process may or may not be. In this case, though, I did things a little bit differently. Since load balancers have a reputation for being tricky to configure, I decided to use the documentation. In doing so, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Kemp has created a deployment guide specifically for Hyper-V.
Ultimately, I decided to manually configure the load balancer because I wanted to get a better feel for its interface. However, Kemp offers several downloadable templates designed for specific use cases. These templates can help to further simplify the configuration process.
What if VIP subnet is configured only inside of load balancer and external interface of the loadbalancer uses different IP subnet? Is such a scenario supported with ACI? In standard DC network I'd use a static route for VIP range towards the external LB interface.
A load balancer is a hardware or software solution that distributes network traffic over numerous servers or virtual machines in order to optimize resource consumption, assure high availability, and improve application and service performance.
Load balancers can boost application performance and availability by spreading traffic over numerous servers or virtual machines, preventing any one server from being overloaded or unavailable. They can also enable scalability by dynamically adding or deleting servers based on demand.
Load balancers are frequently used in online applications, e-commerce sites, and other services requiring high availability, scalability, and performance. Depending on the organization's needs, they can be deployed as physical appliances, virtual computers, or cloud-based services.
Before detailing the problem that I had, I just want to point out that there are many reasons for a server to be marked as offline by a load balancer, and that you should check the obvious ones first, such as if all services are running, if Exchange is coming back as healthy when using tools such as the Get-ServerHealth or Exchange cmdlet, System Center Operations Manager (SCOM) if you have it, etc.
The Kemp Virtual LoadMaster (VLM) is a highly efficient load balancer and application delivery controller (ADC) that supports the major application workloads with easy-to-use templates to simplify and speed-up the deployment and configuration.
Note that regardless of where Virtual LoadMasters are deployed, a consistent administration interface is presented via Web UI, API and Kemp 360 Central. Kemp 360 Central provides cross-platform configuration and monitoring of load balancing resources to simplify the administration of multi-load balancer environments.
The short answer is because you need it for production and a redundant environment and because VMware does not provide any embedded load balancer (LB) in the VMware Horizon deployment (unless you have also a NSX deployment).
Note that you will need at least a pair of load balancers for availability and redundancy purposes. But with UAG you will need a dedicated LB pair, because for security reasons those components are in the DMZ network.
Note that the automation the configuration of LoadMaster is possible both for VLM and hardware appliances due to the powerful LoadMaster API that enables automation (for example, with RESTful or PowerShell) of the load balancer configuration and administration.
Installing the Kemp LoadMaster load balancer is simple enough. Just download a ZIP file that contains the OVF files (and also the Installation Guide and the release notes) for VMware vSphere and deploy it like any other virtual appliance.
If you are looking to play around with load balancing for free, then check out the Kemp LoadMaster virtual Appliance. The Kemp virtual appliance is a great free Linux Load Balancer that is extremely easy to setup, versatile, and offers a lot of options. The trial download activates the product at the VLM 5000 level which delivers up to 5GB throughput and 10000 SSL TPS. After the 30 day trial is over, the virtual appliance turns into the free appliance with limitations of throughput and other functionality imposed. However, for a lab environment the appliance is great tool in testing load balancing web and other applications.
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