HAProxy is an open source, free, veryfast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing and proxy for TCP and HTTP-based applications. It is particularly suited for very high traffic web sites and powers quite a number of the world’s most visited ones. Over the years it has become the de-facto standard opensource load balancer, is now shipped with most mainstream Linux distributions, and is often deployed by default in cloud platforms.
The content of this blog entry is taken from Load balancing Windows Terminal Server – HAProxy and RDP Cookies or Microsoft Connection Broker
In this blog entry, we will put in a sample working haproxy configuration to load balance between terminal services
Step 1: Install haproxy
# yum install haproxy
Step 2: Modify /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg
#--------------------------------------------------------------------- # Global settings #--------------------------------------------------------------------- global # to have these messages end up in /var/log/haproxy.log you will # need to: # # 1) configure syslog to accept network log events. This is done # by adding the '-r' option to the SYSLOGD_OPTIONS in # /etc/sysconfig/syslog # # 2) configure local2 events to go to the /var/log/haproxy.log # file. A line like the following can be added to # /etc/sysconfig/syslog # # local2.* /var/log/haproxy.log # log 127.0.0.1 local2 chroot /var/lib/haproxy pidfile /var/run/haproxy.pid maxconn 4500 user haproxy group haproxy daemon stats socket /var/lib/haproxy/stats #--------------------------------------------------------------------- # common defaults that all the 'listen' and 'backend' sections will # use if not designated in their block #--------------------------------------------------------------------- defaults timeout queue 1m timeout connect 60m timeout client 60m timeout server 60m # ------------------------------------------------------------------- # [RDP Site Configuration] # ------------------------------------------------------------------- listen cattail 155.69.57.11:3389 mode tcp tcp-request inspect-delay 5s tcp-request content accept if RDP_COOKIE persist rdp-cookie balance leastconn option tcpka option tcplog server win2k8-1 192.168.6.48:3389 weight 1 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 3 server win2k8-2 192.168.6.47:3389 weight 1 check inter 2000 rise 2 fall 3 option redispatch listen stats :1936 mode http stats enable stats hide-version stats realm Haproxy\ Statistics stats uri /
Information:
- timeout client and timeout server is put at 6 hours (360m) to keep idle RDP session established
- persist rdp-cookie and balance rdp-cookie. These instruct HAProxy to inspect the incoming RDP connection for a cookie; if one is found, it is used to persistently direct the connection to the correct real server
- The 2 tcp-request lines help to ensure that HAProxy sees the cookie on the initial request.
To see the haproxy reports, the URL can be found at http://localhost:1936/haproxy?stats
Reference:
The Linux Cluster 