Setting up keepalived on Ubuntu (load balancing using HAProxy on Ubuntu part 2)

In our previous post we have set up a HAProxy loadbalancer to balance the load of our web application between three webservers, here’s the diagram of the situation we have ended up with:

              +---------+
              |  uplink |
              +---------+
                   |
                   +
                   |
              +---------+
              | loadb01 |
              +---------+
                   |
     +-------------+-------------+
     |             |             |
+---------+   +---------+   +---------+
|  web01  |   |  web02  |   |  web03  |
+---------+   +---------+   +---------+

As we already concluded in the last post, there’s still a single point of failure in this setup. If the loadbalancer dies for some reason the whole site will be offline. In this post we will add a second loadbalancer and setup a virtual IP address shared between the loadbalancers. The setup will look like this:

              +---------+
              |  uplink |
              +---------+
                   |
                   +
                   |
+---------+   +---------+   +---------+
| loadb01 |---|virtualIP|---| loadb02 |
+---------+   +---------+   +---------+
                   |
     +-------------+-------------+
     |             |             |
+---------+   +---------+   +---------+
|  web01  |   |  web02  |   |  web03  |
+---------+   +---------+   +---------+

So our setup now is:
- Three webservers, web01 (192.168.0.1), web02 (192.168.0.2 ), and web03 (192.168.0.3) each serving the application
- The first load balancer (loadb01, ip: (192.168.0.100 ))
- The second load balancer (loadb02, ip: (192.168.0.101 )), configure this in the same way as we configured the first one.

To setup the virtual IP address we will use keepalived (als also suggested by Warren in the comments):

loadb01$ sudo apt-get install keepalived

Good, keepalived is now installed. Before we proceed with configuring keepalived itself, edit the following file:

loadb01$ sudo vi /etc/sysctl.conf

And add this line to the end of the file:

net.ipv4.ip_nonlocal_bind=1

This option is needed for applications (haproxy in this case) to be able to bind to non-local addresses (ip adresses which do not belong to an interface on the machine). To apply the setting, run the following command:

loadb01$ sudo sysctl -p

Now let’s add the configuration for keepalived, open the file:

loadb01$ sudo vi /etc/keepalived/keepalived.conf

And add the following contents (see comments for details ont he configuration!):

# Settings for notifications
global_defs {
    notification_email {
        your@emailaddress.com			# Email address for notifications 
    }
    notification_email_from loadb01@domain.ext  # The from address for the notifications
    smtp_server 127.0.0.1			# You can specifiy your own smtp server here
    smtp_connect_timeout 15
}
 
# Define the script used to check if haproxy is still working
vrrp_script chk_haproxy { 
    script "killall -0 haproxy" 
    interval 2 
    weight 2 
}
 
# Configuation for the virtual interface
vrrp_instance VI_1 {
    interface eth0
    state MASTER 				# set this to BACKUP on the other machine
    priority 101				# set this to 100 on the other machine
    virtual_router_id 51
 
    smtp_alert					# Activate email notifications
 
    authentication {
        auth_type AH
        auth_pass myPassw0rd			# Set this to some secret phrase
    }
 
    # The virtual ip address shared between the two loadbalancers
    virtual_ipaddress {
        192.168.0.200
    }
    
    # Use the script above to check if we should fail over
    track_script {
        chk_haproxy
    }
}

And start keepalived:

loadb01$ /etc/init.d/keepalived start

Now the next step is to install and configure keepalived on our second loadbalancer aswell, redo the steps starting from apt-get install keepalived. In the configuration step for keepalived, be sure change these two settings:

    state MASTER 				# set this to BACKUP on the other machine
    priority 101				# set this to 100 on the other machine

To:

    state BACKUP 			
    priority 100			

That’s it! We have now configured a virtual IP shared between our two loadbalancers, you can try loading the haproxy statistic page on the virtual IP adddress and should get the statistics for loadb01, then switch off loadb01 and refresh, the virtual IP address will now be assigned to the second loadbalancer and you should see the statistics page for that.

In a next post we will focus on adding MySQL to this setup as requested by Miquel in the comments on the previous post in this series. If there’s anything else you’d like us to cover, or if you have any questions please leave a comment!