How to configure KEMP Load Balancer for vRA Distributed setup

I recently wrote a detailed blog post on how to setup a vRA 7.1 distributed setup using the silent installer. One of the important parts of setting up the distributed environment was configuring the  load balancer (LB). The LB distributes the traffic among many redundant nodes of the infrastructure service. VMware has a document for configuring load balancing for vRA. The document covers the details of how this is done using F5, VMWare NSX and Citrix Netscalar. Since I decided to use KEMP VLM-5000, this blog details the steps in configuring it for vRA.

KEMP Technologies offers NFR licenses for VLM-5000 for all the VMWare Certified Professionals (VCPs) and vExperts. Claim yours if you haven’t already. This is of great help if you are setting up a lab environment in your home lab or testing the product out. The VLM-5000 ships as a small appliance file which is less than 100MB and runs fine with 2vCPUs and 2GB RAM.

Once the zip is extracted, the required OVF files can be used to deploy the VM. Once deployed, just login into the VM and run a config command to setup the networking and you are all set to start. The DNS has to be configured and the KEMP VLM VM should be able to reach it.

Login into the KEMP LB by pointing the browser to the IP or DNS of the VM. Click on the option Virtual Services > Add New

Type in the virtual IP in the virtual address space. Choose port 443 and give it a service name. In my case ‘vra-va-vip’.

This configures the load balancing bit of it. Next step is to type in the URL and the HTTP method used to monitor the URL.

Add the server address and the port and leave the other settings default.

The servers nodes ( Or as KEMP calls it “Real servers”) that are added will show up on the portal.

This completes the config for the vra-va pool. The screenshots for the web and mgr are below.

The “Real Server Check Method” setting has to be set as “TCP Connection Only” during the installation and changed to HTTPS Protocol later.

This completes the config of the KEMP Load Balancer for vRA Distributed setup. If you like the article or have any feedback to provide, drop a comment below. To get updates on latest blog posts, follow me on twitter @abhilashhb.