Veritas Help Center

IP load balancing

Veritas Access Administrator's Guide

IP load balancing has been introduced in Veritas Access 7.3.1 release.

The purpose of this feature is to reduce the number of virtual IPs required for Veritas Access. With IP load balancing, a single virtual IP is used to act as a load balancer IP which distributes the incoming requests to the different nodes in the Veritas Access cluster for the services that are run on an active-active cluster.

A request is a client session and not an individual I/O. Therefore, the IP load balancing feature balances the incoming client sessions and distributes them across the nodes in a round-robin fashion. However, it does not balance the incoming I/O requests on the Veritas Access cluster.

The following functionality is available in this feature:

One of the existing Veritas Access virtual IP is configured as the load balancer IP.
All clients can connect to the Veritas Access cluster using this single virtual IP.
Veritas Access makes use of load balancer algorithms internally to allocate the next available Veritas Access node to serve the client.

Currently, the Veritas Access cluster makes use of the round-robin algorithm in the implementation of the load balancer.
If the router node restarts, shuts down or halts for any reason, the IP load balancing is switched to another node automatically.
If the serving node restarts, shuts down or halts for any reason, the node is removed automatically from the IP load balancing and the request served by that node is transferred to another node.

To configure the load balancer

Enter the following command to configure the load balancer.
```
Network> loadbalance configure <virtual IP>
                  
```
The virtual IP that is to be configured as the IP load balancer should be added and brought online from CLISH before you execute the loadbalance configure command.

To view the status of the load balancer

Enter the following command to view the status of the load balancer.
```
Network> loadbalance status 
                  
```
The Network> ip addr show command also shows the virtual IP which acts as the IP load balancer in its output.

To remove the load balancer configuration

Enter the following command to remove the load balancer configuration.
```
Network> loadbalance remove
                  
```

To switch the load balancer virtual IP to another host manually

Enter the following command to switch the load balancer virtual IP to another host manually.

Network> ip addr online load balancer virtual IP 
                        new node