Guidelines for load balancers

Use a load balancer to ensure seamless failover when TrueSight Operations Management is configured for high availability. The following topic provides information on how to prepare and configure a load balancer.

Terminologies

• Node — A node is a logical object on the load balancer System that identifies the IP address of a physical resource on the network. You can explicitly create a node, or you can instruct Local Traffic Manager to automatically create one when you add a pool member to a load balancing pool.
• Load balancing pool — A load balancing pool is a logical set of devices, such as web servers, that you group together to receive and process traffic. Instead of sending client traffic to the destination IP address specified in the client request, Local Traffic Manager sends the request to any or available servers that are members of that pool.
• Health monitors — The purpose of health monitors is check the health, performance, and load. If a monitored device, link, or service does not respond within a specified timeout period, or the status indicates that the service is down or performance is degraded or that the load is excessive, the load balancer system redirects the traffic to another resource. The load balancer identifies the active node using health monitors.
• Virtual server — A virtual server is a traffic management object on the load balancer system that is represented by an IP address and a service. Clients on an external network can send application traffic to a virtual server, which then directs the traffic according to your configuration instructions. The main purpose of a virtual server is often to balance traffic load across a pool of servers on an internal network.

High-availability of TrueSight Operations Management components

• In a Presentation Server HA pair, only one node will be active and the other node will be in standby .
• In an Infrastructure Management HA pair, only one node will be active and the other node will be in standby at any point in time.
• In an Integration Service cluster, both the nodes can be active at any point in time.
• In a Cell HA pair, both the nodes can be active at any point in time.

Load balancer placement

The following illustration identifies the recommended placement of load balancers with respect to the TrueSight Operations Management components.

Use case 1: Load balancer for the TrueSight Presentation Server

See #1 in the preceding illustration.

To configure the load balancer for Presentation Server, the health monitors should be as follows:

Step 1: Create health monitor based on HTTP Queries

Step 2: Add ‘Virtual server of TSPS’ as referrer host to the Presentation Server

Run the following commands from the Presentation Sever command prompt (installationDirectory\truesightpserver\bin) to add or append the 'Virtual server of TSPS' as referrer host name:

• tssh properties list
  Check tspsProxyHosts if any host(s) are listed.
• Add 'Virtual server of TSPS' to the existing value:
  • tssh properties set tspsProxyHosts <Virtual server of TSPS (FQDN format preferred)>
  • tssh properties reload

Use case 2: Load balancer for the TrueSight Infrastructure Management server

See #2 in the preceding illustration.

To configure the load balancer for Infrastructure Management, the health monitors should be as follows:

Step 1: Create health monitor based on HTTP Queries

Step 2: Add ‘ Virtual server of TSIM’ referrer host to the Infrastructure Management Server

• Open the pronet.conf file located at the installationDirectory\pw\custom\conf directory.
  • Add or append the 'Virtual server of TSIM (FQDN format preferred)' to the following pronet.conf property:
    • pronet.tsim.proxy.hosts=<existing host(s), if any>,<Virtual server of TSIM (FQDN format preferred)>
    • Save the file changes.
    • Run the following command to reload the properties:
    • pw jproperties reload

Use case 3: Load balancer for the TrueSight Integration server and PATROL Agents

See #3 in the preceding illustration.

To configure the load balancer for Integration Service and PATROL Agents, the health monitors should be as follows:

Step 1: Create health monitor based on TCP port queries

Step 2: Add ‘ Virtual server of TSIS’ referrer host to the PATROL Agents

In the PATROL Agent, modify the following setting:

Step 3: Set the algorithm for load balancer

The load balancer should follow the algorithm of round-robin with least connections.

Use case 4: Load balancer for the Cell

See #4 in the preceding illustration.

To configure the load balancer for the Cell, the health monitors should be as follows:

Step 1: Create health monitor based on TCP port queries

Step 2: Add ‘ Virtual server of Cell’ referrer host to the event sources

In the event sources, change the gateway to the 'Virtual server of Cell'.

Step 3: Set the protocol for load balancer

The load balancer should route the traffic to the active Cell.