This section describes how to configure the basic settings for an SE group: High availability and virtual service placement, SE capacity, and limit, memory allocation, and licenses. The options discussed in this section are specific to an SE group created under the Default-Cloud.

Procedure

  1. Under the Basic Settings tab, enter the Service Engine Group Name.
  2. There are several metrics, such as End to End Timing, Throughput, Requests, and more. The NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller updates these metrics periodically, either at a default interval of five minutes, or as defined in the Metric Update Frequency. Enable Real Time Metrics to gather detailed metrics aggressively for a limited period, as required.

    • Enter 0 to collect metrics aggressive to indefinite periods of time

    • Enter a value, for example, 30 min to collect real time metrics for the defined 30 minutes. After this period of time elapses, the metrics collection reverts to slower polling. Real time metrics is helpful when troubleshooting.

  3. Under High Availability & Placement Settings configure the behavior of the SE group in the event of an SE failure. You can also define how the load is scaled across SEs. Select one of the modes, as required.
    Option Description

    Legacy HA

    (Active/Standby)

    Select this mode to mimic a legacy appliance load balancer for easy migration to NSX Advanced Load Balancer Controller. Only two Service Engines may be created.  For every virtual service active on one, there is a standby on the other, configured and ready to take over in the event of a failure of the active SE.  There is no Service Engine scale out in this HA mode.

    Health Monitoring on Standby Service Engine(s) to enable active health monitoring from the standby SE for all placed virtual services.

    • Distribute Load to use both the active and standby Service Engines for virtual service placement in the legacy active standby HA mode.

    • Auto-redistribute Load to make failback automatic so that virtual services that are migrated back to the SE that replaces the failed SE.

    Elastic HA

    (Active/Active)

    Select this mode to permit up to N active SEs to deliver virtual services, with the capacity equivalent of M SEs within the group ready to absorb SE(s) failure(s).

    In Elastic HA (Active/Active), under VS Placement across Service Engines, select the mod: required.

    • Compact for NSX Advanced Load Balancer to spin up and fill up the minimum number of SEs. It tries to place virtual services on SEs which are already running.

    • Distributed (default), for NSX Advanced Load Balancer to maximize the virtual service performance by avoiding placements on existing SEs. Instead, it places virtual services on newly spun-up SEs, up to the maximum number of Service Engines.

    Elastic HA

    (N+M Buffer)

    Select this mode to distribute virtual services across a minimum of two SEs.

    In Elastic HA (N+M Buffer), under VS Placement across Service Engines, select the mod: required.

    • Compact (default), for NSX Advanced Load Balancer to spin up and fill up the minimum number of SEs. It tries to place virtual services on SEs which are already running.

    • Distributed (default), for NSX Advanced Load Balancer to maximize the virtual service performance by avoiding placements on existing SEs. Instead, it places virtual services on newly spun-up SEs, up to the maximum number of Service Engines.
  4. In the field Virtual Services per Service Engine enter the maximum number of virtual services (from 1 to 1000), that the Controller cluster can place on a single Service Engine in the group.
  5. Select Service Engine Self-Election to enable SEs to elect a primary amongst themselves in the absence of a connectivity to controller. This ensures Service Engine high availability in handling client traffic even in headless mode.
  6. Under Service Engine Capacity and Limit Settings, enter the Max Number of Service Engines to define the maximum number of service engines that can be created within an SE group. This number, combined with the virtual services per SE setting, dictates the maximum number of virtual services that can be created within an SE group. If this limit is reached, new virtual services may not be deployed. The status will be grey indicating un-deployed status. This setting can be useful to prevent NSX Advanced Load Balancer from consuming too many virtual machines.
  7. Configure Memory Allocation.
    1. Enable Host Geolocation Profile to provide extra configuration memory to support a large geo DB configuration.
    2. Enter the value of total SE memory reserved for application caching (in percentage). Restart the SE for this change to take effect. Available Memory for Connections and Buffers is the memory available besides caching. This field is automatically updated depemding on the percentage entered as Memory for Caching.
    3. Use the Connections and Buffers Memory Distributionslider to define the percentage of memory (10% to reserved to maintain connection state. This is allocated at the expense of memory used for HTTP in-memory cache.
  8. Under the License section, NSX Advanced Load Balancer maps the license type based on the type of cloud.
    Option Description

    Container cloud

    Max SEs

    OpenStack and VMware

    Cores

    Linux

    Sockets
  9. Select Enable Per-app Service Engine Mode to deploy dedicated load balancers per application, that is, per virtual service. In this mode, each SE is limited to a maximum of two virtual services. vCPUs in per-app SEs count towards licensing at 25% rate.
  10. Select the Service Engine Bandwidth Type for the license. This option is deactivated when Enable Per-app Service Engine Mode is enabled.
  11. Enter the Number of Service Engine Data Paths to configure the maximum number of se_dp processes that handles traffic. If this field is not configured, NSX Advanced Load Balancer takes the number of CPUs on the SE.
  12. Select Use Hyperthreading to enable the use of hyper-threaded cores for se_dp processes. Restart the SE for this change to take effect.
  13. Click Save to complete the configuration. Optionally, you can click the Advanced tab to continue configuring advanced options for the SE group.