Tag Archives: Loadmaster

Kemp LoadMaster OEM Servers and Dell Firmware Updates with Lifecycle Controller

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When you buy a DELL OEM based Kemp Technologies LoadMaster you might wonder who will handle the hardware updates to the server. Well Dell handles all OEM updates via its usual options and as with all LoadMasters Kemp Technologies handles the firmware update of the LoadMaster image.

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Hardware wise both DELL and Kemp have been two companies that excel in support. If you can find the solution that meets your needs it’s a great choice. Combine them and it make for a great experience.  Let me share a small issue I ran into updating Kemp Loadmaster OEM Servers and Dell Firmware Updates with Lifecycle Controller

For a set of DELL R320 loadmasters in HA is was upgrading ( I not only wanted to move to 7.1-Patch28b-BARE-METAL.bin but I also wanted to take the opportunity to bring the firmware of those servers to the latest versions as that had been a while (since they had been delivered on site).

There is no OS that runs in those server,s as they are OEM hardware based appliances for the Loadmaster image. No worries these DELL servers come with DRAC & Lifecycle controllers so you can leverage those to do the firmware updates from a Server Update Utility ISO locally, via virtual media, over over the network, via FTP or a network share. FTP is either the DELL FTP Site or an internal one.

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Now as I had just downloaded the  latest SUU at the time (SUU-32_15.09.200.74.ISO – for now you need to use the 32 bit installers with the life cycle controller) I decided to just mount it via the virtual media, boot to the lifecycle controller and update using local media.

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But I got stuck  …

It doesn’t throw an error but it just returns to the start point and nothing can fix it. Not even adding “/repository”  to the file path . You can type the name of an individual DUP (32 bit!) and that works. Scanning the entire repository however wouldn’t move beyond step 2 “Enter Access Details”.

Scanning for an individual DUP seemed to work but leaving the file path blank while trying to find all eligible updates seemed not to return any results so I could not advance. The way I was able to solve this was by leveraging the DRAC ability to update it own firmware using the firmware image file to the most recent version. I just got mine by extracting the DUP and taking the image file from the payload sub folder.

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You can read on how to upgrade DRAC / Lifecycle Controller via the DRAC here.

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When you’ve done that, I give the system a reboot for good measure, and try again. I have found in all my cases fixes the issue. My take on this is that older firmware can’t handle more recent SUU repositories. So give it a try if you run into this and you’ll be well on your way to get your firmware updated. If you need help with this process DELL has excellent documentation here in “Lifecycle Controller Platform Update/Firmware Update in Dell PowerEdge 12th Generation Servers”

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The end result is a fully updated DELL Server / Kemp Loadmaster. Mission accomplished. All this can be done from the comfort of your home office. A win-win for both you and your customer/employer. Think about it, it would be a shame to miss out on all the benefits you get from working in the cloud when your on premises part of a hybrid infrastructure forces you to get in a car and drive to a data center 70 km away. Especially at 21:21 at night.

Remote Access to the KEMP R320 LoadMaster (DELL) via DRAC Adds Value

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If you have a virtual Loadmaster you gain a capability you do not have with an appliance: console access. You can have lost all network connectivity to the Loadmaster but you can still gain access over the Hyper-V console connection to the virtual machine. Virtual appliances are not the only or best choice for all environments and needs. When evaluating your options you should consider going for a bare metal solution like the DELL R320.

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These are basically DELL servers and as such have a Dell Remote Access Card (DRAC) that allows for remote access independently of the production network. Great for when you need to resolve an issue where you cannot connect to the unit anymore and you’re not near the Loadmaster. It also allows for remote shutdown and start capabilities, mounting images for updates, … all the good stuff. Basically it offers all the benefits of a DELL Server with a DRAC has to offer.

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That means I have an independent way into my load balancer to deal wit problems when I can no longer connect to it via the network interface or even when it is shut down. As we normally telecommute as much as possible, either from the offices, on the road or home this is a great feature to have. It sure beats driving to your data center at zero dark thirty if that is even a feasible option. image

I know that normally you put in two units for high availability but that will not cover all scenarios and if you have a data center filled with DELL PowerEdge servers that have DRAC and you cannot restore services because you cannot get to your load balancers that’s a bummer. It’s for that same reason we have IP managed PDU, OOB capabilities on the switches. The idea is to have options and be able to restore services remotely as much as possible. This is faster, cheaper and easier than going over there, so reducing that occurrence as much as possible is good. Knowledge today flies across the planet a lot faster than human being can.

Options For A Highly Available Load Balanced RD Gateway Server Farm on Hyper-V

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When you need to make the RD Gateway service highly available you have some options. On the RD Gateway side you have capability of configuring a farm with multiple RD Gateway servers.image

When in comes to the actual load balancing of the connections there are some changes in respect load balancing from Windows Server 2008 R2 that you need to de aware of! With Windows 2008 R2 you could do:

  1. Load balancing appliances (KEMP Loadmaster for example, F5, A10, …) or Application Delivery Controllers, which can be hardware, OEM servers, virtual and even cloud based (see Load Balancing In An Ever More Demanding Virtualized & Cloudy World). KEMP has Hyper-V appliances, many others don’t. These support layer 4, layer 7, geo load balancing etc. Each has it’s use cases with benefits and drawback but you have many options for the many situations you might encounter.
  2. Software load balancing. With this they mean Windows NLB. It works but it’s rather limited in regards to intelligence for failure detection & failover. It’s in no way an “Application Delivery Controller” as load balancer are positioned nowadays.
  3. DNS Round Robin load balancing. That sort of works but has the usual drawbacks for problem detection and failover.  Don’t get me wrong for some use cases it’s fine, but for many it isn’t.

I prefer the first but all 3 will do the basic job of load balancing the end-user connections based on the traffic. I have done 2 when it was good enough or the only option but I have never liked 3, bar where it’s all what’s needed, because it just doesn’t fit many of the uses cases I dealt with. It’s just too limited for many apps.

In regards to RD Gateway in Windows Server 2012 (R2), you can no longer use  DNS Round Robin for load balancing with the new HTTP transport. The reason is that it uses two HTTP channels (one for input and one for output) and DNS round robin cannot guarantee that both these connections will be routed trough the same RD Gateways server which is a requirement for it to work. Basically RRDNS will only work for legacy RPC-HTTP. RPC could reroute a channel to make sure all flows over the same node at the cost of performance & scalability. But that won’t work with HTTP which provides scalability & performance. Another thing to note is that while you can work without UDP you don’t want to. The UDP protocol is used  to deliver graphics with a better user experience  over even low quality networks for graphics or high and experiences with RemoteFX. TCP (HTTP) is can be used without it (at the cost of a lesser experience) and is also used to maintain the sessions and actions. Do note that you CANNOT use UDP alone as these connections are established only after the main HTTP connection exists between the remote desktop client and the remote desktop server. See Don’t Forget To Leverage The Benefits of RD Gateway On Hyper-V & RDP 8/8.1 for more information

So you will need a least Windows Network Load Balancing (WNLB) because that supports IP affinity to make sure all channels stick to the same node. UDP & HTTP can be on different nodes by the way. Also please not that when using network virtualization WNLB isn’t a good choice. It’s time to move on.

So the (or at least my) preferred method is via a real “hardware” load balancer.  These support a bunch of persistence options like IP affinity, cookie-based affinity, … just look at the screenshot below (KEMP Loadmaster)

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But they also support layer 7 functionality for better health checking and failover.  So what’s not to like?

So we need to:

  1. Build a RD Gateway Farm with at least two servers
  2. Load balance HTTP/HTTPS for the RD Gateway farm
  3. Load balance UDP for the RD Gateway farm.

We’ll do this 100% virtualized on Hyper-V and we’ll also make make the load balancer it self highly available. Remember, removing single points of failure are like bottle necks. The moment you take one away you just hit the next one Smile.

Kemp has a great deployment guide for RDS on how to do this but I should ass that you could leverage SUB Virtual Services (SUBVS) to deal with the other workloads such as RD Web Access if they’re on the same server. They don’t mention this in the white paper but it’s an option when using HTTP/HTTPS as service type for both configurations. #1 & #2 are the SUB Virtual Services where I used this in a lab.

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But for RD Gateway you can also leverage the Remote Terminal Service type and in this case you won’t leverage SUBVS as the service type is different between RD Gateway (Remote Terminal) and RD Web Access (HTTP/HTTPS). This is actually used by their RDS template you can download form their support site.

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Hope this helps some of you out there!

Quick Demo Video Of Site Failover With KEMP Loadmaster Global Balancing

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Here’s a quick video that demonstrates how you can achieve site failover with via the KEMP Loadmaster Global Balancing feature. As long as you know what this can do for you and realize that it about site failover and high availability and not continuous availability without a second of service interruption you can deliver nice results with this technology across city campuses or between cities.

In our scenario we normally connect to the primary data center (weighted round robin) and fail over to the DRC when the primary site fails for some reason.

It’s very busy at the moment but I hope to address this topic a bit more in detail in the future. All of this runs virtualized on Hyper-V and performs just fine.