The role of a load balancer is to improve the availability of services by distributing the load to a pool of back end servers. When it comes to load balancing, Azure has a few different products to choose from.
• Azure Application Gateway – If you require a load balancer that can provide features such as SSL offloading, reverse proxy and works in the application layer (layer 7), Azure application gateway is the answer.
• Azure Traffic Manager – If you are looking for DNS level load balancing which can distribute traffic to global endpoints, Azure traffic manager will be the product to look at.
• Azure Load Balancer – Azure load balancer works in layer 4 (transport layer) and can distribute network traffic to endpoints in the same Azure region. It can use to distribute internet traffic as well as internal traffic. In this post, we are going to look into this service in detail.
Like many other load balancers, Azure load balancer also has the following components.
• Frontend/Virtual IP address – This is the load balancer IP address that works as a front door to clients. After clients initiate connections to a frontend IP address, the traffic will be distributed to the back-end servers.
• Server pool – The back-end application servers will be group together in a pool to serve an incoming request from a load balancer.
• Rules – The incoming traffic will be distributed to the backend servers according to the rules defined in the load balancer.
• Probes – If a back-end server is down, load balancer needs to know. Then it can stop distributing traffic to the faulty server. The load balancer uses probs to detect the health of the back-end servers.
• Inbound NAT rules – Inbound NAT rules define how the traffic is forward from the load balancer to the back-end server.
In this post, I am going to demonstrate how we can load balance a web application using Azure standard load balancer. This demo includes the following tasks,
1. Setup new resource group
2. Setup two new windows VM
3. Setup IIS with sample web page
4. Create Azure load balancer
5. Create a backend pool
6. Create health probes
7. Create load balancer rule
8. Testing
Setup new resource group
Let's go ahead and start the setup process by creating new Azure resource group.
For the configuration process, I will be using Azure PowerShell. Therefore, please make sure you have an Azure PowerShell module installed. More info about it can find under https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/azure/install-az-ps?view=azps-2.6.0
1. Launch PowerShell console and connect to Azure using Connect-AzAccount
2. Then create a new resource group using,
New-AzResourceGroup -Name REBELRG1 -Location "East US"
In the above, REBELRG1 is the resource group name and East US is the resource group location.
Setup two new windows VM
1. In this demo, I am going to use two back end servers. Before VM setup, let's go ahead and create a new virtual network.
$vmsubnet = New-AzVirtualNetworkSubnetConfig -Name vmsubnet -AddressPrefix "10.0.2.0/24"
New-AzVirtualNetwork -Name REBELVN1 -ResourceGroupName REBELRG1 -Location "East US" -AddressPrefix "10.0.0.0/16" -Subnet $vmsubnet
In the above, REBELVN1 is the new virtual network name. It has 10.0.0.0/16 address space. It also has a new subnet 10.0.2.0/24 (vmsubnet) for virtual machines.
2. Then I need to create a new availability set. To add back end servers to load balancer, those VMs need to be in the same availability set.
New-AzAvailabilitySet -Location "EastUS" -Name "REBELAS1" -ResourceGroupName "REBELRG1" -Sku aligned -PlatformFaultDomainCount 2 -PlatformUpdateDomainCount 2
In above REBELAS1 is the availability group name. More info about scale sets can found here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machine-scale-sets/availability
3. As the next step of the configuration, I am going to create two new virtual machines under REBELRG1 resource group.
$mylogin = Get-Credential
New-AzVm -ResourceGroupName REBELRG1 -Name "REBELTVM01" -Location "East US" -VirtualNetworkName "REBELVN1" -SubnetName "vmsubnet" -addressprefix 10.0.2.0/24 -PublicIpAddressName "REBELTVM01IP1" -AvailabilitySetName "REBELAS1" -OpenPorts 3389,80 -Image win2019datacenter -Size Standard_D2s_v3 -Credential $mylogin
New-AzVm -ResourceGroupName REBELRG1 -Name "REBELTVM02" -Location "East US" -VirtualNetworkName "REBELVN1" -SubnetName "vmsubnet" -addressprefix 10.0.2.0/24 -PublicIpAddressName "REBELTVM02IP1" -AvailabilitySetName "REBELAS1" -OpenPorts 3389,80 -Image win2019datacenter -Size Standard_D2s_v3 -Credential $mylogin
In the above, I am creating two virtual machines called REBELTVM01 & REBELTVM02. It is running windows server 2019 data center edition. I have specified it using -Image parameter. It also using Standard_D2s_v3 vm size. For networking, It uses REBELVN1 virtual network and subnet 10.0.2.0/24.
