F5 Load Balancers

When leveraging your Cloud Servers to host an application that scales up and down (e.g., the web tier of an application), it is important to have a method for adding and removing Cloud Servers from their associated load balancer pool(s). If you use an F5 Big-IP Local Traffic Manager with RackConnect, you can specify the load balancer pool name that a Cloud Server should be placed into upon creation. When you delete the Cloud Server, it will automatically be removed from the pool.

With RackConnect, there are two ways that you can automatically associate your Cloud Servers with one or more load balancer pools on your F5:

Option 1 — Metadata: When creating a Cloud Server, leverage the metadata option to specify the pool(s).

Metadata Key: RackConnectLBPool
Metadata Value: (The exact name of the pool as defined on the load balancer; use a semi-colon separated list for more than one pool)

In this example, multiple Metadata Pool values are entered for the Cloud Server

Additionally, you can also specify the metadata values when utilizing the Cloud Servers API to create new cloud servers. Please view the API documentation for further details on how to utilize the API to enter metadata information for a cloud server:

• API Developer Guide: Set Metadata

Note: The metadata values are only read by RackConnect when a cloud server is initially created, so changing the metadata values for a cloud server that is already deployed will not have any effect on Load Balancer Pool memberships.

Option 2 — Name Match: Before spinning up your Cloud Servers, provide us with your preferred name and the pool(s) to associate with your Cloud Servers. Currently, you must configure this through a ticket request to your Support team.

Regardless of which option you select:

• Verify that an appropriate health check has been configured for members of the load balancer pool(s) used. The health check should confirm that the website or application is fully ready to accept end-user traffic, as the Cloud Server may be added almost immediately after creation, but before your application is ready to accept traffic, depending on the timing of the automation. For example, it would be advisable to use a URL content check versus a TCP port check to confirm that a web application is ready to accept end-user requests.

• The service port for each member of the load balancer pool must match or the automation will not be able to determine which service port should be used. (For this same reason, there should always be at least one member in the pool.)  If a common service port cannot be determined, a notification will be routed to your Support team for manual intervention.

To get the name of one or more load balancer pools, contact your Support team.

Inbound RackConnect Traffic Flow with a F5 Load Balancer

Here is a diagram of the path that inbound (and return) Load Balancer Pool traffic follows to your RackConnected Cloud Servers when utilizing an F5 with RackConnect:

Brocade Load Balancers

The Brocade ADX can also be used as a load balancer that balances traffic between dedicated and cloud servers. In this case, the RackConnect Connected Device will be an ASA Firewall and any traffic that needs to be load balanced to cloud servers will flow from the ADX to the Firewall to the cloud servers.

Benefits of utilizing a Brocade Load Balancer with RackConnect:

• The ability to load balance traffic between dedicated servers and cloud servers

• The ability to use cloud servers as 'sorry servers' for a Load Balancer Pool *

• The ability to maintain Client Identity (Source IP Persistence) to RackConnected Cloud Servers via utilization of X-Forwarded headers **

Limitations of utilizing a Brocade Load Balancer with RackConnect:

• Since the Brocade cannot function as a RackConnect Connected Device, the RackConnect Automation Feature that automatically adds/removes cloud servers from your Load Balancer Pools will not be available

• The Brocade will need to function as a Full Proxy for all external requests to your cloud servers

* A 'sorry server' normally contains a static maintenance page that users are directed to when health checks fail for all the members of a Load Balancer Pool.
** Your Support Team can provide more details on the caveats around maintaining Client Identity.

Inbound RackConnect Traffic Flow with a Brocade Load Balancer

Here is a diagram of the path that inbound and return Load Balancer Pool traffic follows to your RackConnected cloud servers when utilizing a Brocade with RackConnect:

Please contact your Support Team if you have any questions about using Dedicated Load Balancers with RackConnect.

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