Citrix ADC VPX Web Server Load Balancer Configuration

This is the fourth blog post about my work with Citrix ADC VPX which, as mentioned before, will be used as a Web Server Load Balancer.

All blog posts in this series includes:

• Deploy Citrix ADC VPX On Nutanix AHV
• Install Apache On CentOS
• Initial Citrix ADC VPX Configuration
• Citrix ADC VPX Web Server Load Balancer Configuration

Finally we are going to do the actual Citrix ADC VPX Load Balancer configuration. There are four main sections in this configuration.

• • Servers
  • Service Groups or Services – You can use what best fits your purpose and in my case it’s Service Groups
  • Virtual Servers
  • Verify Functionality

Servers

The first thing we need to do is adding the actual web servers by following the below steps

• Click Configuration -> Traffic Management -> Load Balancing -> Servers -> Add
  
• Provide the information needed, see below, and click Create:
  • Name
  • IP Address
  • Click “Enabled after Creating”
  • Comments
    
• Repeat until you have the number of web servers you need. In my case I just added two for testing.
  

Service Groups or Services

Second thing to do is adding the newly created Servers to a Service Group.

• Click Configuration -> Traffic Management -> Load Balancing -> Service Groups -> Add
  
• Provide the information needed, see below, and click Ok:
  • Name
  • Protocol
  • Comments
  • Any other information needed in your case.
    
  • Click Ok once more
    
  • Click No in the “Service Group Members” area
    
  • Select Server based and click “Click to select”
    
  • Select the Servers you want to add, in my case I selected both, and click Select
    
  • Provide the information needed, see below, and click Create:
    • Port
    • Any other information needed in your case.
      

Now we have 2 Web Servers added to 1 Service group and it seems to be all green as well:)

Virtual Servers

Next thing we will do is to add the newly created Service Group to a Virtual Server.

• Click Configuration -> Traffic Management -> Load Balancing -> Virtual Servers -> Add
  
• Provide the information needed, see below, and click Ok:
  • Name
  • Protocol
  • IP address Type
  • IP Address
  • Port
    
• Click No in the “Load Balancing Virtual Server ServiceGroup Binding” section
  
• Click “Click to select”
  
• Click the radio button next to the Service Group you want to add and click Select
  
• Click Bind
  
• Click Continue
  
• Click Done
  

That’s it. Now we have a Virtual Server which will act as a load balancer in-front of our Service Group which right now consists of two web servers.

Verify Functionality

To verify the load balancer functionality we just have to do the following

• Open a web browser and point it to the Virtual Server IP (VIP) which in my case was 192.168.10.150
• First I’m directed to web server with Name wedb-demo1 which has ip address 192.168.10.151
• Click refresh and now I’m directed to web server with Name wedb-demo2 which has ip address 192.168.10.152