The VMware Aria Operations for Logs integrated load balancer (ILB) supports VMware Aria Operations for Logs clusters and ensures that incoming ingestion traffic is accepted by VMware Aria Operations for Logs even if some VMware Aria Operations for Logs nodes become unavailable. You can also configure multiple virtual IP addresses.
It is a best practice to include the ILB in all deployments, including single-node instances. Send queries and ingestion traffic to the ILB so that a cluster can easily be supported in the future if needed. The ILB balances traffic across nodes in a cluster and minimizes administrative overhead.
The ILB ensures that incoming ingestion traffic is accepted by VMware Aria Operations for Logs even if some VMware Aria Operations for Logs nodes become unavailable. The ILB also balances incoming traffic fairly among available VMware Aria Operations for Logs nodes. VMware Aria Operations for Logs clients, using both the web user interface and ingestion (through syslog or the Ingestion API), connect to VMware Aria Operations for Logs through the ILB address.
ILB requires that all VMware Aria Operations for Logs nodes be on the same Layer 2 networks, such as behind the same switch or otherwise able to receive ARP requests from and send ARP requests to each other. The ILB IP address must be set up so that any VMware Aria Operations for Logs node can own it and receive traffic for it. Typically, this means that the ILB IP address is in the same subnet as the physical address of the VMware Aria Operations for Logs nodes. After you configure the ILB IP address, try to ping it from a different network to ensure that it is reachable.
To simplify future changes and upgrades, you can have clients point to an FQDN that resolves to the ILB IP address, instead of pointing directly to the ILB IP address.
About Direct Server Return Configuration
The VMware Aria Operations for Logs load balancer uses a Direct Server Return (DSR) configuration. In DSR, all incoming traffic passes through the VMware Aria Operations for Logs node that is the current load balancer node. Return traffic is sent from VMware Aria Operations for Logs servers directly back to the client without needing to go through the load balancer node.
Multiple Virtual IP Addresses
You can configure up to 60 virtual IP addresses (vIPs) for the Integrated Load Balancer. You can also configure a list of static tags to each vIP so that each log message received from the vIP is annotated with the configured tags.
