Adding Listeners

Once a load balancer is created, Hostwinds clients will now need to be added, so that your load balancer can listen for inbound traffic on the ports that are specified.

Add Listener

On the load balancer page, select the menu options icon, and select Add Listener

A new window will pop-up, with the listener’s with the following configurable options.

Description

Short description of the listener being created, or a name.

Connection Limit

This is the limit per-second for this listener type, by-default it is set to unlimited.

Type

HTTP

Listens to traffic via the HTTP protocol with a default port of Port 80.

HTTPS

Listens to traffic via the HTTPS protocol with a default port of Port 443.

HTTPS W/SSL

Listens to traffic via the HTTPS protocol with a default port of Port 443. The difference however, is this allows for the SSL to be served through the Load Balancer itself, meaning an SSL would not be needed on the web server.

TCP

Listens to traffic via the TCP protocol, with a default port of Port 80.

Algorithim Options

Round Robin

The load balancer will select a member for workload handling on a round-robin basis, each member will receive equal amounts of pressure.

Least Connections

The load balancer will select the member for workload that has the least amount of established connections.

Source IP

The load balancer will compute hash values based on the IP address of the client and the server, then use the hash value for optimial routing. This ensures that requests from the same client (IP address) will always go to the same member, even when there is an issue of broken connections.

Listener Port

This is where you can configure the port in which the listener will listen on, default is configured as Port 80.

Only one port can be configured for each load balancer, you cannot have 2 listeners listening to the same port.

Persistence Type

This is used to persist client sessions even if the connection becomes broken. There are 3 different types of session persistence:

Application Cookie

The load balancer will check the application specific cookie using the name specified, to resume connection based on the cookie’s contents. This option requires the name of a cookie to be specified, seen in the image above.

HTTP Cookie

The load balancer will check a named, general HTTP cookie, to resume connection based on the cookie’s contents.

Use Source IP

The load balancer will attempt to resume a broken connection based on the client’s IP address, does not require cookies.

Viewing Listeners

To view all listeners for a Load Balancer, select the load balancer by clicking on it’s name from the load balancer panel in Cloud Control.

The above example shows a load balancer named HWTest, with one listener, being HWTestListener.