Before an organization administrator can configure load balancing services, a system administrator must enable the load balancer on the NSX edge gateway. You can also edit the load balancer settings.

You can add an IPv6 service network either during the enablement of NSX Advanced Load Balancer or later.

VMware Cloud Director supports transparent load balancing. Transparent mode indicates whether the source IP address of the client in incoming packets is visible to the backend servers.

Prerequisites

  • Verify that you are logged in as a system administrator.

  • Verify that you integrated VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer in your cloud infrastructure. For more information on managing NSX Advanced Load Balancer, see VMware Cloud Director Service Provider Admin Guide.
  • If you want to use an IPv6 service network to configure IPv6 virtual IP addresses for virtual services and IPv6 load balancer pool members, verify that you configured DHCPv6 mode with SLAAC enabled on the NSX edge gateway.

Procedure

  1. From the primary left navigation panel, select Networking and from the page top navigation bar, select Edge Gateways.
  2. Click the NSX edge gateway on which you want to enable load balancing.
  3. Under Load Balancer, click General Settings.
  4. Click Edit.
  5. To enable the load balancer, turn on the Load Balancer State toggle.
  6. Edit the general settings of the load balancer.
    1. Select a feature set.
      If you enable the edge gateway with a Premium feature set, you can only configure the edge gateway to use Premium features. If you enable the gateway with a Standard feature set, you can choose to use either Standard or Premium features.
      Option Description
      Standard The standard feature set provides the load balancing features included in VMware NSX Advanced Load Balancer Basic Edition.
      Premium The premium feature set provides access to some Premium features, such as, for example, additional load balancing pool algorithm types and pool persistence profiles, virtual service analytics, pool analytics, multiple virtual service ports, and additional virtual service application profile types.
    2. To activate client IP preservation, toggle on the Transparent Mode option.
  7. On the NSX-T Cloud tab, choose whether you want VMware Cloud Director to automatically associate the load balancer with an NSX cloud or manually select the cloud with which you want to associate the load balancer.
    When you select the Manual option, you can see the edge gateway capacity of each cloud.
  8. On the Service Network tab, enter CIDR for service network subnets from which to use IP addresses for creation of virtual services.
    You can use IPv4 networks, IPv6 networks, or both.
    You can use the default IPv4 service network subnet by selecting the Use Default check box.
  9. Click Save.

What to do next

Assign a Service Engine Group to an Edge Gateway.