• • Marketplace

  • Create

  • Configuration

  • Availability Set

  • Virtual Network

  • Domain

  • Endpoints

  • Buy

  • Load Balanced Set

  • Accessing your ALB-X

  • Example Virtual Service

Summary

This guide is intended to provide an overview of Edgenexus ALB-X for Azure. It
will describe the process to find, build and setup our advanced Layer7
accelerating load balancer in the Microsoft Azure infrastructure

Traffic Flow

Azure Load Balancer

There are two levels for load balancing available for Azure infrastructure services:

Virtual
machines in the same cloud service or virtual network can communicate
with each other directly using their private IP addresses. Computers
and services outside the cloud service or virtual network can only
communicate with virtual machines in a cloud service or virtual network
with a configured endpoint. An endpoint is a mapping of a public IP
address and port to that private IP address and port of a virtual
machine or web role within an Azure cloud service.

The
Azure Load Balancer randomly distributes a specific type of incoming
traffic across multiple virtual machines or services in a configuration
known as a load-balanced set. For example, you can spread the load of
web request traffic across multiple web servers or web roles.

The
following figure shows a load-balanced endpoint for standard
(unencrypted) web traffic that is shared among three virtual machines
for the public and private TCP port of 80. These three virtual machines
are in a load-balanced set.

Edgenexus ALB-X for Azure

Whilst the Azure Load Balancer provides layer 4 load balancing for your
cloud service, the Edgenexus ALB-X offers application delivery and
optimisation features such as Layer 7 load balancing with session
persistence, traffic manipulation,
content caching, compression and SSL offload to name but a few. The
Edgenexus ALB-X also provides granular control of the real servers
allowing you to take real servers in and out of service on the fly
without losing connectivity. Please follow this link for the full list of features.

There are a few ways that you may want to deploy your Edgenexus ALB-X in
azure. edgeNEXUS recommends deploying in a highly available (HA) configuration.

The figure below shows how a typical HA deployment will look using two Edgenexus ALB-X to provide HA for three web servers.

• • Edgenexus ALB-X in Azure is limited to one network interface
    and as such the connectivity modes of Transparency and Gateway will not
    work.

• • All ALB-X virtual services in Azure share the same IP address so Clustering between ALB-X is not possible at this stage. You must
    configure each ALB-X individually. We are working on a method to
    synchronize configurations in Azure.

• • Let’s start by accessing the Microsoft Azure marketplace using the URL https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/
  • Type “jetnexus” in the search box to show the available load balancers

• • For this guide let’s use the 500Mb Accelerating Load Balancer which is limited to 500Mbps throughput

• • Select this and then click Create Virtual Machine

• • You will then see the following animation before the create screen is shown

• • Add a suitable hostname for your ALB-X – here we have given ours albx-guide-1 as we will be creating albx-guide-2 a little later
  • Add username which will be used to log on to the ALB-X
  • Add a valid password
  • Choose a pricing tier. A1 is acceptable for development environment only

• • To provide redundancy to your application, we recommend that you group
    two or more virtual machines in an Availability Set. This configuration
    ensures that during either a planned or unplanned maintenance event, at
    least one virtual machine will be available and meet the 99.95% Azure
    SLA.
  • In this example we are going to create an availability set called guide-avset

• • Here we are creating a new virtual network called albx-guide-1
  • This becomes more relevant when you deploy additional ALB-X so they can talk to each other on the local subnet
  • You may also use this same virtual network for your application VMs and publish the end points through the ALB-X only

• • Create a new domain for your service. This is usually something generic such as Web Service. Here we have named it albx-guide-ha

• • You may stipulate the internal IP address of the VM, or like we have done here, leave it to dynamically assign using DHCP

• • Choose existing storage account or create a new storage account

• • By default your ALB-X will add the following endpoints
  • TCP port 443 – Secure Web

• • TCP port 80 – Normal Web
  • TCP port 27376 – Management interface
  • TCP port 22 – SSH access
  • You can create more endpoints at this stage or once the ALB-X is created
  • Note
    that when you create the second ALB-X VM it will assign unique public
    ports to these end points as they will be in the same service
  • Also, if you wish to use the Azure load balancer by creating a load balance set then the endpoints need to be unique
  • Example: to create load balance set using port 80, you will first need to delete the exisitng port 80 end point

• • Once the optional settings have been compled click Create and then Buy

• • Your VM will take around 5 minutes to be created

• • Once complete you should receive the messages saying Deployment Successful

• • Create a second ALB-X with a different hostname. Here we are using albx-guide-2
  • Use the same availability set
  • Use the same domain
  • Use the same virtual network subnet as the 1st ALB-X
  • Use the same resource group
  • Use the same location
    

• • As previously mentioned to provide HA for a service we need to create load balance set for each service
  • The example below adds a load balance set for port 80 on albx-guide-1
  • In order to do this we must first delete the old port 80 endpoint
  • Create a load balancer set with name – web-lbset-80
  • Protocol =  TCP
  • Public port = 80
  • Probe protocol = HTTP
  • Probe path =  /
  • Probe interval = 30
  • Number of retries = 3

• • Now that we have created a load balance set for port 80 on albx-guide-1 you can add this on albx-guide-2
  • Make sure that you have already deleted the web port 80 endpoint from  albx-guide2
  • Click Join from within the Load Balanced sets
  • Select web-lbset-80 from “use an existing load balanced set”
    

• • During the creation process we gave our service a name of albx-guide-ha.cloudapp.net
  • A management endpoint was also created equal to 27376
  • As we have two ALB-X under the same service we need to make the public management port unique
  • By default Azure will deploy the second ALB-X with a uniquely high public port that will map to 27376 internally
  • We have deleted the auto created endpoints and changed them for 27371 and 27372 for albx-guide-1 and albx-guide-2 respectively

• • Here is where we tie the both together to access the ALB-X – https://albx-guide-ha.cloudapp.net:27371
  • Login to your ALB-X using the same username and password setup earlier

• • Once logged on you will be automatically taken to the IP Services page
  • Here you will find an example Web Service that uses the www.jetnexus.com web site as a real server
  • The
    real Server IP address can be any public  Internet address or a
    private address in the same virtual subnet or routable subnet
  • Please note that the image below shows a real server IP address that may not be live at the time of reading this guide