Recently, my virtual Zeus load balancer wouldn't boot up properly so I figured I would just rebuild it. Come to find out, I couldn't remember everything I did to get it working properly so now I'm documenting it for anyone else that may want to do this. Zeus Load balancer is a great free utility that was recently acquired by Riverbed Technologies and is now labeled as the Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager. It's a good product for home labbers because it will do SSL HTTPS load balancing which works great for vCloud or View testing. Check out Chris Colotti's post Load Balancing Considerations for vCloud.
To get the product, sign up for a Zeus/Riverbed Developer Account. You will be emailed a username and password and will get access to the downloads area and see these files below:
I downloaded the VMware OVF (64-bit). Unzip the package and begin the OVF transport process from the vSphere Client. Make sure you download your license key somewhere as well because it's needed during setup.
Be sure to set the portgroup of this NIC to whatever you want the management of the device to be. DHCP is preferred
Before we power on the VM. Edit the settings and add an additional NIC. This secondary NIC is what we will use for the actual load balanced traffic. This way we can separate our types of traffic on the NICs/VLANs and not interfere with workloads. I also changed my VM to only use 512MB of RAM (doesn't show in the picture) because this is a home lab and RAM gets used up quickly.
Also, before we begin, let's add our DNS entries. I added a DNS entry for our management IP and DNS entries for my vCloud needs.
Now let's fire up the VM. Once the VM fires up, check out the IP address.
Head on over to that IP address and begin the installation process.
Once we have configured it with a new IP address, lets go ahead and login. We can use the DNS address we assigned earlier.
We need to do a little house cleaning to make sure this will work correctly. First thing is to make sure we get eth1 as our default for all traffic. Click on the globe on the main menu and select Edit for Traffic IP Networks. Add in the subnets you want this load balancer to handle on eth1. for mine, I selected 192.168.50.0/24. Click update and you're done.
Next we need to create a new traffic group. I went ahead and made mine vcloud.kendrickcoleman.c0m and assigned the IP address used in the DNS setup.
After it's configured, the drop down box should say that it will be using eth1.
Go to the Wizard menu at the top right and select Manage A New Service.
A pop-up window will come up to begin the process. Click Next
Give your service a name, select the type of connection (for vCloud and View, it will be SSL with HTTPS), ports will be auto-populated.
Enter in the hostnames for every server running the software. click add node and the port will be appended to it automatically
Click Finish. This has created a virtual server and pools for you. We will need to edit these setting before we continue.
Go back to the global editing view so we can edit our virtual server
scroll down to the basic settings and change from All IP Addresses to the Traffic IP Group that we created earlier. Now click update
Click on the Pools configuration and let's edit our newly created pool
If you scroll down there are a few different options we can set. The first one is the load balancing algorithm. By default, it's set at Round Robin, so each new connection goes to a different connection server. This is good for making sure that all servers are functioning properly. You may want to change this to the server with the least amount of connections or anything else you wish. You can also set the monitoring capability. By default, it is set at Ping, but that can be changed to SSL HTTP if you want and you can test logging with a username or password. Ping is good enough for me though. The other important setting we need is Session Persistence. Lets go ahead and edit this setting.
Click on Manage Persistence Class
Add a new class called "IP Persistence". Doing this will send a user to the same node if they are in the middle of a long session. You can do this based on cookies as well, and it's up to you as the admin.
Click on the Home button and make sure that your new service is started and running.
Now go to your newly created load balanced page :)
