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PROJECT 8: LOAD BALANCER SOLUTION WITH APACHE

Task

Deploy and configure an Apache Load Balancer for Tooling Website solution on a separate Ubuntu EC2 intance. Make sure that users can be served by Web servers through the Load Balancer.

Prerequisites

Make sure that you have following servers installed and configured within Project-7:

  1. Two RHEL8 Web Servers
  2. One MySQL DB Server (based on Ubuntu 20.04)
  3. One RHEL8 NFS server

project8_architecture Project 8 Architecture Diagram

CONFIGURE APACHE AS A LOAD BALANCER

1. Create an Ubuntu Server 20.04 EC2 instance and name it Project-8-apache-lb, so your EC2 list will look like this:

aws_instances

2. Open TCP port 80 on Project-8-apache-lb by creating an Inbound Rule in Security Group.

inbound_rules

3. Install Apache Load Balancer on Project-8-apache-lb server and configure it to point traffic coming to LB to both Web Servers:

#Install apache2
sudo apt update
sudo apt install apache2 -y
sudo apt-get install libxml2-dev

#Enable following modules:
sudo a2enmod rewrite
sudo a2enmod proxy
sudo a2enmod proxy_balancer
sudo a2enmod proxy_http
sudo a2enmod headers
sudo a2enmod lbmethod_bytraffic

#Restart apache2 service
sudo systemctl restart apache2

#Make sure apache2 is up and running
sudo systemctl restart apache2

Configure load balancing

sudo vi /etc/apache2/sites-available/000-default.conf

#Add this configuration into this section <VirtualHost *:80>  </VirtualHost>

<Proxy "balancer://mycluster">
              BalancerMember http://<WebServer1-Private-IP-Address>:80 loadfactor=5 timeout=1
              BalancerMember http://<WebServer2-Private-IP-Address>:80 loadfactor=5 timeout=1
              ProxySet lbmethod=bytraffic
              # ProxySet lbmethod=byrequests
        </Proxy>

        ProxyPreserveHost On
        ProxyPass / balancer://mycluster/
        ProxyPassReverse / balancer://mycluster/

#Restart apache server

sudo systemctl restart apache2

default_conf file

4. Verify that our configuration works – try to access your LB’s public IP address or Public DNS name from your browser:

http://<Load-Balancer-Public-IP-Address-or-Public-DNS-Name>/index.php

login_page

loggedIn_page

Note: If in the Project-7 you mounted /var/log/httpd/ from your Web Servers to the NFS server – unmount them and make sure that each Web Server has its own log directory.

Open two ssh/Putty consoles for both Web Servers and run following command:

sudo tail -f /var/log/httpd/access_log

web_server_1_logs

web_server_1_logs

Optional Step – Configure Local DNS Names Resolution

Sometimes it is tedious to remember and switch between IP addresses, especially if you have a lot of servers under your management. What we can do, is to configure local domain name resolution. The easiest way is to use /etc/hosts file, although this approach is not very scalable, but it is very easy to configure and shows the concept well. So let us configure IP address to domain name mapping for our LB.

#Open this file on your LB server

sudo vi /etc/hosts

#Add 2 records into this file with Local IP address and arbitrary name for both of your Web Servers

<WebServer1-Private-IP-Address> Web1
<WebServer2-Private-IP-Address> Web2

host_file

Now you can update your LB config file with those names instead of IP addresses.

BalancerMember http://Web1:80 loadfactor=5 timeout=1
BalancerMember http://Web2:80 loadfactor=5 timeout=1

lb

You can try to curl your Web Servers from LB locally curl http://Web1 or curl http://Web2 – it shall work.

curl_web1

curl_web2

Remember, this is only internal configuration and it is also local to your LB server, these names will neither be ‘resolvable’ from other servers internally nor from the Internet

complete_setup

Project 8 Complete Project Architecture Diagram