How-tos
Wizardry from our load balancer experts
AWS / Azure / GCP
How to design a disaster recovery plan for your cloud infrastructure
To design a well-targeted disaster recovery plan, you need to work out two key metrics: the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)...
AWS / Azure / GCP
How to add Cloudflare in front of HAProxy
Cloudflare provides a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a worldwide network of servers that delivers web content to clients based on the geographic location of the client...
Open source
Highly Available NFS based Kerberos KDC aka. Ganesha + GlusterFS + HAProxy.
Load balancing NFS is a real pain — especially when it comes to the locked mounts issue. In this blog I'll explain how to create a highly available NFS server for Kerberos...
Microsoft
Load Balancing Microsoft Session Host in Azure
The Loadbalancer.org Feedback Agent is installed on the Session Host servers to provide real time performance stats to enable optimum load distribution...
AWS / Azure / GCP
How do you combine AWS Auto Scaling with a proper load balancer?
The Loadbalancer.org appliance automatically detects changes in your auto-scaling groups, with zero configuration and zero downtime...
Application Management
Load Balancing Web Servers with OWASP Top 10 WAF in Azure
In the Azure Management Portal, select the Virtual Machines option, click on the newly deployed Load Balancer VM, click on Network interfaces and then select the network interface attached to the load balancer, then click IP configurations and ensure that IP forwarding is Enabled...
Security
Load Balancing Apache Web Servers with OWASP Top 10 WAF in Azure
The WAF addresses the OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities and is very quick and simple to deploy...
High Availability
Load balancing Nutanix: Choosing an enterprise load balancer
Nutanix offers a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) platform that integrates virtualization, computing, networking, storage, and security resources into a single system...
Direct Server Return
Yahoo’s L3 Direct Server Return (DSR), an alternative to LVS-TUN, explored.
L3 DSR is an alternative technique to achieve direct server return at Layer 3. Instead of using an IPIP tunnel like LVS-TUN it changes the destination IP address like LVS-NAT when sending the traffic to the real server...
Comparisons
JetNEXUS (EdgeNEXUS) review and Kemp comparison
You can check directly what customers having been telling Gartner about Loadbalancer.org, JetNexus, Barracuda Networks and Kemp Technologies on the new Peer Insights platform...
Direct Server Return
Layer 4 Direct Routing (LVS-DR) and Layer 4 TUN (LVS-TUN) in AWS
LVS-DR and LVS-TUN are both forms of Direct Server Return where the load balancer only has to deal with one half of the connection...
Automation
How to automate legacy load balancer deployments
Automation is very important for many organisations, which is why it's one of the core features of our upcoming V9 release...
Security
Security through obscurity - double login protection made easy...
Security through obscurity is not a great idea when it is your ONLY protection technique. For example moving your SSH port from 22 -> 23 won't fool any hackers for long! However, I've always liked putting a 'double login' in front of important web sites to frustrate simple automated hacking tools...
Application Management
How to load balance Microsoft FTP Server with HAProxy
Open standards are awesome, and the File Transfer Protocol FTP (inspite of its flaws) has been in constant use for an amazing 40 years! FTP can be a pain to run over firewalls and load balancers, so this blog explains how to configure Microsoft FTP and HAProxy...
How-tos
Client Certificate Authentication with HAProxy: How to configure
Using client certificates for security is a pretty cool idea! You can protect an entire application or even just a specific Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) to only those that provide a valid client certificate...
Healthcare
How to configure a DICOM ECHO health check for medical imaging systems
We thought it was important to have a specific health check built into our appliance for the commonly used DICOM protocol (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine)...
WAF
Load Balancing Nginx Web Servers with OWASP Top 10 WAF in Azure
SSL offload is handled by STunnel, while HAProxy handles back-end server re-encryption...
How-tos
Transparent vs Explicit proxy — which method should I use?
Different vendors have widely different opinions on which method should be used to deploy web filters or SWGs. Historically, vendors struggled to implement authentication in Transparent mode, and maybe they remember some awkward conversations with customers that chose the wrong method...
AWS / Azure / GCP
IAM what I am
For several years, if an instance was launched in AWS and during the initial configuration an IAM role was not defined, the only option available was to stop/terminate the instance and launch another, however, this has now changed!..
How-tos
Loadbalancer.org Enterprise VA with oVirt(RHEV) 4.1
The appliance works quite nicely in a oVirt environment and should work just as well with a full Red Hat’s Enterprise Virtualization environment (RHEV)!..
Microsoft
MS SQL Health Check
Follow the instructions below to install and configure the external health check, and once you've completed the steps you can use the health check for either layer 4 (LVS) or layer 7 (HAproxy) clusters...
How-tos
Loadbalancer.org with Let's Encrypt - quick and dirty!
Let’s Encrypt offers us a free way to get SSL certificates with the aim of being less complex than other current solutions...
Open source
Transparent HAProxy in Azure using TProxy
HAProxy is an excellent choice if you need layer 7 functionality, but its a full reverse-proxy, so the application thinks that all of the traffic is coming from HAProxys IP - rather than the clients...
Healthcare
I didn't realise NTP was so important for medical imaging systems like PACS and VNA
We can write custom health checks specific to your environment checking availability of servers as well as other backend systems such as REST servers, databases and storage...