Load Balancer Management

Our load balancers monitor the health of each connected server and route traffic to the healthy servers. Hostwinds provides multiple options for how you would like to achieve this, and this article will show you how to do so.

Load Balancer Management

Note: To make full use of this section, you must log in to the Hostwinds Client Area. To access your Cloud Control portal, you will need to click on the Cloud Control dropdown on the top of the Client portal dashboard menu and click the Cloud Portal link.

On the Cloud Control portal home page, click the Network dropdown link in the top menu of the dashboard. The load balancer link of the dropdown will be at the top. Click this link to move to the Load Balancers page.

From here, you will see all the manageable Load Balancers you have created displayed in a table showing this information:

• Name: The name you have assigned to the server.
• IP Address: This shows all IP addresses with which the load balancer is interacting.
• Created: The date and specific time of the creation of the load balancer.
• Status: The status of the load balancer at the current time.

In addition to the information, the Actions dropdown provides the ability to edit the settings of your load balancer by clicking on the View/Edit link or Recreate your server. Both of these we will cover below.

Editing a Load Balancer

Note: Once you have created a load balancer, you cannot change the name, IP address, location, and status of a load balancer. As for the rest of the information you provided earlier when setting up your load balancer is still editable. For your convenience, we will place the information here as well.

Also, note that for each editable segment below, you must click on the Edit button next to the section's name to do so. In addition, just as it was when you first created the firewall, the Advanced Options dropdown starts closed. You will need to click on the dropdown to expand it and work on your Health Monitor and Listener rules.

Traffic Rules

It would be best to choose the Protocols and Ports under these Traffic Rules now. The available options to choose from are:

• HTTP: This will route from HTTP, usually to the same HTTP. If used with HTTPS on the right side, it may cause errors to occur.
• HTTPS: This will route from HTTPS to HTTPS. If HTTP is on the right side, errors may occur with the site as well.
• HTTPS w/ SSL: You can use this to route from HTTPS to HTTP, as with this, an SSL Certificate is specified and used to encrypt and decrypt to the Load Balancer itself.
• TCP: This is if you are not planning to use HTTP or HTTPS with the Load Balancer but plain TCP.

Note that you can add multiple Rules to this load balancer by selecting the Add New Rule button.

Backend Servers

You can add backend servers to the load balancer as well. The load balancer will send the traffic that comes through these. You can set the IP address and the server name for this server here and add multiple servers. You have the option of enabling or disabling this option using the radio button.

Advanced Options

Health Monitor: By default, Hostwinds disables this option. Health monitors work the same way our Hostwinds Systems Monitoring work by testing to see if the backend servers are functioning correctly. The monitor ensures the load balancer only sends connections to an active or healthy backend server. Set up the rules by entering the data below:

• Delay
• Timeout
• Monitor Type: You can choose from the Monitor Types available:
  • HTTP
  • HTTPS
  • TCP
  • PING
  • TLS-HELLO
• Up Retries: Choose from between one (1) and ten (10) up retries.
• Down Retries: Choose from between one (1) and ten (10) down retries.
• Backend Port
• HTTP Method: You can choose from the Monitor Types available:
  • CONNECT: Reserved for use with a proxy. This is used to start two-way communications with the requested resource.
  • DELETE: Invokes a request for the remote server to delete a resource identified by the URI.
  • GET: This is a request which expects to get back a representation of a specific resource
  • HEAD: Identical to the GET message, except the server must not return a message-body response.
  • OPTIONS: Requests information from the server about the communication options available.
  • PATCH: This is a request that represents a set of instructions to modify an existing resource
  • POST: This is a request which represents a request to create an entirely new resource
  • PUT: This is a request that represents what an existing or new resource should look like if the request is successfully processed
  • TRACE: Used to reflect the request message to the requester allowing the requester to see what is being received by the server and to use that information for testing and diagnostic information.
• HTTP Response Codes (only available on HTTP and HTTPS Monitor Types)
• URL Path

Listener Rules

Listener rules determine how the traffic distributes.

• Round Robin: The load balancer alternates routing between the available pool of backend servers sequentially.
• Least Connections: The load balancer keeps numerical track of the connections it sends to each backend server. It attempts requests to the server with the least amount of active session connections.
• Source IP: This algorithm will generate a Hash from the IP address accessing the Load Balancer and distributing it to a server.