Manage load balancers

Owned by MS (Unlicensed)
Jan 17, 2023
7 min read

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:

  1. Go to Cloud virtual datacenters view

  2. Select a virtual datacenter

  3. Go to Network → Load balancers.

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

  1. Go to Cloud virtual datacenters view

  2. Click the Locations button and select a location

  3. 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:

  1. Go to Cloud virtual datacenters view

  2. Go to Global → Azure → Resource Groups → select a resource group

  3. To display the details of the load balancer, edit the load balancer

Create a load balancer

This document describes how to create a standard load balancer. See also:

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

Privileges: Manage load balancers, Assign load balancers

To create a load balancer:

  1. Go to Virtual datacenters → select a virtual datacenter → Network → Load balancers 

    1. For vCloud, select All virtual datacenters → Network → Load balancers → Region

  2. 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

Field

Value

Field

Value

Name

The name of the load balancer.

  • Amazon will only accept the following characters: A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and "-", and you cannot modify the name

  • Azure will not accept names with white space

Type

In Azure, select the SKU, which can be standard or basic

Algorithm

See cloud provider documentation for more information

Resource group

The platform will create the load balancer in the selected resource group

Addresses

  • AWS: private or public IP
    Azure ARM: private or public IP
    NSX: private IP, or private and public IPs
    vCloud Director: private or public IP (IPs on external networks)

  • You may be able to change the address to another one in the same VDC by editing the load balancer

Subnets

In providers that support subnets, the subnets to which the load balancer will connect

Load balancer routing rules

Field

Value

Field

Value

Common protocols

Select one of the common protocols to load presets

Protocol in

The incoming protocol to the load balancer. See cloud provider documentation for accepted values.

Port in

The incoming port to the load balancer. See cloud provider documentation for accepted values.

Protocol out

The outgoing protocol from the load balancer.

Port out

The outgoing port from the load balancer

SSL Certificate

For secure connections (e.g. HTTPS), you can add an SSL certificate.

  • The platform will never store or validate the SSL certificate 

  • The platform will pass the certificate directly to the provider

Select an existing certificate or add a new one. Cannot be used in platform-only load balancers and some providers

Add

Click Add to save a routing rule for the load balancer

To delete a routing rule, click the delete button beside the name of the routing rule in the list

Load balancer SSL certificate

Some providers support TLS certificate

Field

Value

Field

Value

Name

Name of the certificate

Certificate

The certificate contents

Intermediate certificate

An intermediate certificate can be issued by a provider to support older browsers that may not have all of the trusted root certificates for that provider, so that users will not receive invalid TLS warnings. If you have an intermediate certificate, add it at the same time as the certificate to ensure that a trusted-chain certificate is configured.

Private key

The RSA private key for the certificate

Load balancer health check

The health check is optional in some providers.

Field

Value

Field

Value

Common protocols

Select one of the most common protocols to load presets

Name

Name of the health check

Protocol

The protocol with which the health check will be performed

Port

The port to which the health check will be performed

Path

The server path to ping (for supported protocols)

Interval (sec)

The interval in seconds between health checks

Timeout (sec)

The timeout in seconds after which an attempted health check will be considered unsuccessful

Attempts

The number of attempts before the health check will be considered unsuccessful

Add

Add the current health check to the load balancer

Load balancer firewalls

If your provider supports firewalls, to add a firewall to your load balancer, select your firewall from the list of Firewalls that are in your provider. 

 

If a firewall is not on the list, it may not have been properly synchronized. In this case, click Cancel, synchronize firewalls, then start again to create a new load balancer.

Assign load balancer nodes

To assign your load balancer to VMs, drag and drop the VMs from the Available Nodes list into the Attached Nodes list.

 

  • The VMs to be load balanced can be in the same or different virtual appliances in the same virtual datacenter

  • You can also attach VMs by selecting load balancers when configuring the VM. 

The platform will display the Status of the load balancer nodes on the Nodes tab, if status information is available from the provider.

You can also check the status using the Abiquo API.

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 

Privileges: Assign load balancers

To assign a VM 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

  1. Go to Virtual datacenters → All virtual datacenters

  2. Go to Network → Load balancers → select region

To synchronize all load balancers in a VDC or region:

  1. Go to Virtual datacenters

  2. Select the VDC or region

  3. 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:

  1. Go to myCloud 

  2. In public cloud, depending on the provider, go to Virtual datacenters (AWS, Azure, OCI), Locations (GCP regional), or Global  (GCP)

  3. Select a VDC, location, or provider

  4. Go to Network → Load balancers

  5. Select the load balancer

  6. Click the delete button

  7. In public cloud, you can select the checkbox to delete the load balancer only in Abiquo and not in the provider

  8. In public cloud, also delete the target groups

In public cloud, 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).

In private cloud with NSX-T, you can delete network resources by deleting the virtual datacenters. The platform will automatically remove VMs, virtual appliances, load balancers, public IPs, and firewalls from the virtual datacenter. The firewalls will remain in the enterprise and you can reuse them. When you delete a virtual datacenter, public IPs that are not used by VMs will remain in the provider and the synchronization process will delete them.

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