User Guide

User Guide

Warning

Neutron-lbaas-dashboard is now deprecated. Please see the FAQ: https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Neutron/LBaaS/Deprecation

Load-Balancer-as-a-Service (LBaaS) enables networking to distribute incoming requests evenly among designated instances. This distribution ensures that the workload is shared predictably among instances and enables more effective use of system resources. Use one of these load-balancing methods to distribute incoming requests:

  • Round robin: Rotates requests evenly between multiple instances.

  • Source IP: Requests from a unique source IP address are consistently directed to the same instance.

  • Least connections: Allocates requests to the instance with the least number of active connections.

As an end user, you can create and manage load balancers and related objects for users in various projects. You can also delete load balancers and related objects.

LBaaS v2 has several new concepts to understand:

Load balancer

The load balancer occupies a neutron network port and has an IP address assigned from a subnet.

Listener

Each port that listens for traffic on a particular load balancer is configured separately and tied to the load balancer. Multiple listeners can be associated with the same load balancer.

Pool

A pool is a group of hosts that sits behind the load balancer and serves traffic through the load balancer.

Member

Members are the actual IP addresses that receive traffic from the load balancer. Members are associated with pools.

Health monitor

Members may go offline from time to time and health monitors diverts traffic away from members that are not responding properly. Health monitors are associated with pools.

View existing load balancers

  1. Log in to the OpenStack dashboard.

  2. On the Project tab, open the Network tab, and click the Load Balancers category.

    This view shows the list of existing load balancers. To view details of any of the load balancers, click on the specific load balancer.

Create a load balancer

  1. Log in to the OpenStack dashboard.

  2. On the Project tab, open the Network tab, and click the Load Balancers category.

  3. Click the Create Load Balancer button.

    Use the concepts described in the overview section to fill in the necessary information about the load balancer you want to create.

    Keep in mind, the health checks routinely run against each instance within a target load balancer and the result of the health check is used to determine if the instance receives new connections.

Note

A message indicates whether the action succeeded.

Delete a load balancer

  1. Select the load balancer you want to delete and click the Delete Load Balancer button.

    To be deleted successfully, a load balancer must not have any listeners or pools associated with it. The delete action is also available in the Actions column for the individual load balancers.

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