What Is F5 Load Balancer and How It Works

Overview

When setting up a cluster to provide high availability for the Bizagi Work portal, you will need to ensure that you configure a load balancer to route requests to the different servers of your cluster.

Bizagi recommends the use of a hardware-based load balancer such as f5, along with specific aspects for you to consider when configuring this load balancer.

Configuration requisites

The important aspects you will need to consider are:

1.The use of a "sticky" mechanism in f5 for the persistence profile, such as persistence.

2.The use of a load balancing algorithm in f5 which takes advantage of your servers as much as possible, such as the method.

Before you start

Consider that through the steps listed below, you will simply set up the f5 load balancer.

This means that you know which Bizagi servers you will be employing for a clustered setup (ideally you should have by now configured your Bizagi Work portal in all servers and activated applicable licenses).

Configuring f5 load balancing.

Follow these steps to configure both as the persistence profile, and a algorithm in f5.

1.Browse into the tab of the f5 configuration and locate the group.

2.Go into and click the icon next to to add a new one.

3.Give a to the pool (plus a meaningful if you wish), and ensure you choose as the protocol to involve in the configuration.

4.At this point you may also choose to set as the (alternatively you may choose another method which best considers your servers capacity).

5.Use the option to specify the and for each of the Bizagi servers making up your cluster.

Ensure you set the and protocol accordingly as well (i.e., , using ).

6.When done, click the button so that the server is registered as a node  belonging to the actual pool and shown in the table below.

Recall that you need to do steps #5 and #6 for each of the servers of your cluster so that in the end, you have them all registered and displayed in the table of .

7.Click when done.

8.Back in the tab and group, locate the and click on the icon next to to add a new one.

9.Give a to the virtual server (plus a meaningful if you wish), and ensure you specify: The (IP as how you wish end users to target Bizagi) and the specs (port number and protocol; i.e., using ). You may leave other settings with default values.

10.Next at the configuration, ensure you select for the .

11.Ensure you select your corresponding SSL certificate for the configuration, and you may select as the one applicable to configuration. Choose as the value for .

12.For the setting, ensure you select the pool you created previously (steps #3-5), and leave the default option for the .

Click when done.

Important

This guide seeks to illustrate those main aspects and requirements needed for an f5 load balancer to work with Bizagi (i.e., a "sticky" mechanism for persistence, and a load balancing method/algorithm which attempts to route requests as evenly as possible to all servers in a cluster), according to vendor's best practices.

This guide is not comprehensive as to illustrating all steps possibly needed for a f5 configuration or further tuning as per customer's specific settings. Specific order of steps or user interfaces presented may vary according to the employed f5 version.

For additional and complete f5 information, refer to f5's official web site.

For instance, refer to:

•https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/ltm-profiles-reference-12-1-0/4.html for details about the different Persistence profile types

•https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/ltm-concepts-11-5-0/5.html for load balancing methods and overall pool features and settings.

What Is F5 Load Balancer and How It Works

Source: https://help.bizagi.com/bpm-suite/en/automation_f5.htm

Share this post