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Imagine this, you have your favorite network virtual appliances (NVAs) sitting in front of your virtual machines (VMs). For one reason or another, you prefer to use firewall or intrusion detection/prevention systems from third-party providers to sit in front of your production or development virtual machine pools. To ensure that your production or development pools are secured by your choice of firewall, you’d usually want to put up more than one firewall virtual machine and have a load balancer sitting in front of these machines to ensure availability. However, with virtual machine pools that can number in the hundreds with multiple port rules for different data streams, this quickly becomes a management nightmare when it comes to assigning load balancing rules. The question then becomes, how do we have the best of both worlds: availability and manageability?

Well, now you can configure High Availability (HA) Ports load balancing rules on SDN for a pool of NVAs so that your NVAs will remain available and easy to manage. This is done by configuring your traffic type to All and setting your frontend and backend ports to 0 for your load balancing rule. With this, you can manage high availability of your NVAs with a single load balancing rule.

A video demo is linked below to show how you would configure this load balancing rule for yourself through Windows Admin Center:

Windows Admin Center:

Ensure that you have configured a public or private VIP for your load balancing rule as well as the backend pool of NVAs for HA ports.

Windows Admin Center will require that you also have a health probe enabled for all load balancing rules.

For HA Ports, ensure that traffic type has been set to ALL and that the Frontend and Backend ports are set to 0.

Every other input is up to your discretion!

For more information regarding configuring HA Ports, please follow this link to our technical documentation Click Here!

Thanks for bearing with me, and I hope you found this blog to be helpful. If you happen to give this new feature a try and would like to give some feedback, then please reach out to sdn_feedback@microsoft.com. Lastly, if you’d like to learn more about Software Load Balancers and SDN, here are some resources to read up on.