Stingray Traffic Manager series Setup
Objective
This page is intended to instruct users on how to import a Stingray Traffic Manager ServerTemplate and how to launch servers into a deployment.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
- This tutorial requires that you set up A records with your DNS provider, to allow clients to send requests to your load balancers. See Domain Setup.
- This tutorial is compatible with only the v13 (infinity) series of application server templates.
Overview
In order to create a high-availability load-balanced web server solution in the cloud, Riverbed has published ServerTemplates that run Stingray Traffic Manager. This is a software load balancer with high reliability that automatically checks the health of your application and decides whether to forward traffic to a particular server based on state of these health checks. Extra functionality (such as SSL-offload) can be provded through the use of additional recipes and through Stingray's Web-based Graphical User Interface.
The conceptual overview diagram (right) illustrates high-level traffic flow. Stingray proxies and load-balances request traffic as it enters the deployment. Once a response is received from the application or web server, it is forwarded back to the original client.
Steps
To deploy a Stingray Traffic Manager, take the following steps. If you already have a deployment in mind, skip to the Import a ServerTemplate section.
Create a Deployment
Create a new Deployment. Later, you will add the Stingray Traffic Manager Server into this Deployment. See Create a New Deployment.
Import a ServerTemplate
Follow the instructions for Importing a ServerTemplate.
Note: You can find all of the Stingray Traffic Manager ServerTemplates in the Load Balancer category, or by searching for Stingray in the Search field.
Add a Server to the Deployment
Add a Server to the Deployment
Note: In some clouds (Rackspace, for example) the name of the server is used for the hostname of the instance. It is strongly advised to use the server's fully-qualified domain name as the server's name at the time of creation.
Define Inputs
The only input that needs to be defined in order to launch a Stingray server is the lb_stingray/password field in the LB_STINGRAY category. The required fields below in the STINGRAY category are automatically filled in by the lb_stingray provider when the instance boots. The lb_stingray/password field can be either a text input or a RightScale credential.
For the pools field in the LB category, you may define only one pool name. This is a known issue, and support for multiple pool names will be added in an subsequent release.
Click on the deployment's Inputs tab. Click Edit and provide values for the following missing Inputs.
| Input Name | Description | Example Value |
| LB_STINGRAY/lb_stingray/password | Sets the password for the admin user of the Stingray Traffic Manager admin server. | cred:LB_STINGRAY_PASSWORD |
| LB/lb/pools | Associates this traffic manager with a specific application. This field can only contain a single string. | text:default |
Note: You are strongly encouraged to use a RightScale credential in this field rather that a plain-text password. This is for both for security and ease-of-management reasons.
Click Save when you are done.
Launch the Server
You are now ready to launch the Server. Go to the deployment's Servers tab and click the Launch action icon next to the all-in-one Server.
Go to the deployment's Servers tab and launch the database server. When you view the input confirmation page, there should not be any required inputs with missing values. If there are any required inputs that are missing values (highlighted in red), cancel the launch and add the missing values at the deployment level before launching the server again. Refer to the instructions in Launch a Server if you are not familiar with this process.
In a few minutes the server will become operational.
Runbook Guide
This runbook assumes that you have a least one operational server that has been launched from an imported Stingray Traffic Manager template. The attach and detach functionality provided by the lb_stingray cookbook will automatically associate (or disassociate) your application instances to your load-balancers. If you would like to change the configuration of the load-balancer, or add extra functionality (such as SSL-offload), there are several ways that you can use to administer your Stingray instance:
- Use the Stingray WebUI (recommended)
- Use the Stingray command-line interface
- Use the Stingray SOAP API (experts only)
Known Issues
The Stingray Traffic Manager series ServerTemplates can currently only support one pool input name. This will be fixed in an upcoming release.
Opening access to the Stingray WebUI
Stingray ServerTemplates come with a default iptables configuration that prevents access to the admin UI. Even if you have applied a security group (ec2 only) that allows access, you will also need to run the sys_firewall::setup_rule recipe in order to open port 9090 so that you can access the WebGUI.
To allow access to the Stingray WebUI, follow the steps below.
- Open the server instance that you want to manage.
- Check the inputs for the sys_firewall/rule/port attribute in the SYS_FIREWALL category; this is set to 9090 by default, which will configure iptables to allow connections from ANY IP address to port 9090 on the instance. You may wish to pinhole this access to a small set of IP Addresses (such as your office's gateway IP).
- Run the sys_firewall::setup_rule recipe to update the iptables configuration.
Once the sys_firewall::setup_rule recipe completes, you should be able to connect to http://<your servers fqdn>:9090 in order to administer your traffic manager. Please locate the appropriate product documentation at Riverbed's Stingray Family Documentation site for detailed usage instructions.
See also
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