Manage Load Balancers

Introduction to load balancers

The load balancer feature aims to simplify the creation of load balancers across all providers in the multi-cloud platform, providing a unified interface.

In AWS, Abiquo supports Application load balancers (see Manage Application Load Balancers) and Classic load balancers (described on this page).

Please refer to cloud provider documentation as the definitive guide to the load balancing features. And remember to check your cloud provider's pricing before you begin.

In vCloud Director, load balancers belong to a public cloud region, not a virtual datacenter. This means that in vCloud Director, you can attach VMs from more than one virtual datacenter to the same load balancer, and these load balancers do not work with private networks, which belong to only one virtual datacenter.

Display load balancers

You can display and manage load balancers in the platform at the level of the virtual datacenter or the location (public cloud region or datacenter).

To display load balancers in virtual datacenters:

Go to Cloud virtual datacenters view
Select a virtual datacenter
Go to Network → Load balancers.

To display load balancers in a region, including those that do not exist in the provider.

Go to Cloud virtual datacenters view
Click the Locations button and select a location
Go to Network → Load balancers

Load balancers that do not exist in the provider are displayed in light gray text and you should delete these load balancers.

To display load balancers in an Azure Resource Group:

Go to Cloud virtual datacenters view
Go to Global → Azure → Resource Groups → select a resource group
To display the details of the load balancer, edit the load balancer

Create a load balancer

Before you begin:

Synchronize your virtual datacenters (including VMs, networks, firewalls, firewall rules, and load balancers)
If required by your provider, create firewalls for your VMs to allow your load balancers to access the VMs
In Azure make sure that your VMs belong to availability sets

Privilege: Manage load balancers, Assign load balancers

To create a load balancer:

Go to Virtual datacenters → select a virtual datacenter → Network → Load balancers
1. For vCloud, select All virtual datacenters → Network → Load balancers → Region
Click the + add button and complete the following dialogs according to your cloud provider's documentation

Load balancer general information

The following screenshots are from AWS or Azure

For more details see GUI Create load balancer General info

Manage load balancers with the API

API Documentation

For the Abiquo API documentation of this feature, see Abiquo API Resources and the page for this resource LoadBalancersResource.

Edit load balancers

The cloud provider determines which elements of a load balancer that you can modify. Due to different provider support for load balancer features, it may be possible to make modifications in the platform that will later be rejected by the cloud provider, triggering an error. Check your cloud provider documentation for supported modifications.

Add tags to a load balancer

To manage tags for a load balancer, edit the load balancer and add tags as described here.

To add a tag, enter the Key and Value, then click Add.

For providers that support tags:

If you have invalid tags, optionally select the checkbox to Create local tags if tags are invalid in the provider
To onboard or update tags with changes from the provider, click the round arrow Synchronize button.

To delete a tag, select the tag, then click the Delete button.

To save your changes, click Save.

Edit VMs to assign or unassign to load balancers

Privilege: Assign load balancers

To assign a virtual machine to a load balancer, select the load balancer from the list.

Onboard and synchronize load balancers from public cloud

When you onboard a VDC from a public cloud provider, the load balancers associated with the VDC and its VMs will be onboarded into the platform.

To access vCloud load balancers, and provider-only load balancers

Go to Virtual datacenters → All virtual datacenters
Go to Network → Load balancers → select region

To synchronize all load balancers in a VDC or region:

Go to Virtual datacenters
Select the VDC or region
Click the arrow synchronize button.

Load balancers that have been deleted directly in the provider are displayed in light gray text. You can edit these load balancers to recreate them in the provider, or delete them.

Delete or release load balancers

To delete a load balancer:

Select the load balancer
Click the delete button.

If your enterprise does not have credentials in the provider, then the load balancer will be released (it will be deleted in the platform but it will remain in cloud provider).

Manage Load Balancers

Introduction to load balancers

Display load balancers

Create a load balancer

Load balancer general information

Load balancer routing rules

Load balancer SSL certificate

Load balancer health check

Load balancer firewalls