HAProxy HA VIP Pacemaker Corosync PCS

Help!
1

…Hello all!

I can not tell you how pleased I was to discover HAProxy. What a brilliant piece of kit!

At work I have 3 IIS servers that front a db backend. Historically the company used the MS NLB which has worked to a degree but does nothing but round robin requests with no ability to report node issues, let alone shoot them in the head!

So I was looking for a solution and came across HAProxy - now understand I am not a Linux guru, my exposure has in the past been very very limited so I have had a bit of a learning curve to do.

I have to say that ‘out of the box’ getting a single instance of HAProxy to load balance across the 3 IIS servers was surprisingly easy.

But you know how it is… I decided the better solution would be to have two instances of HAProxy in an ‘Active/Passive’ configuration to provide a good level of resilience.

I have followed a tutorial from ‘Clusters from Scratch’ which was really useful and another from Digital Ocean as well as dipping into many other resources.

As it stands at the moment I have Pacemaker / Corosync / PCS and HAProxy installed on 2 Ubuntu Servers. The cluster is up and running though I am yet to configure fencing and STONITH.

I am now stuck, probably because I’m not seeing the obvious. I have a VIP setup that the cluster uses as a resource, I now need to add HAProxy as a resource in Pacemaker, before I can I need to setup the HAProxy.cfg file.

In some of the tutorials it says that I need to bind the front end to the host IP, other resources say I need to bind the front end to the virtual IP.

Can someone please clarify this for me?

Many thanks!

2

Hi,

Pacemaker and Corosync makes your VIP.

You need to add HAProxy resource agent to your cluster managed resources and make your cluster with master-slave mode if you want to make active/passive model.

After that make colocation and ordering between your VIP and HAProxy cluster.

Done.

3

morning yes I understand that part of the process - the only thing that is not clear is when I configure the haproxy.cfg, in the front end binding do I bind to the VIP or the actual host IP of that particular haproxy host?

cheers

4

Yes, Bind to VIP and if you have a problem on binding to VIP, just set kernel parameter “ip_nonlocal_bind” to 1 on each hosts.

5

thank you - I’ll give that a go!