High Availability Load Balancing

High Availability Load Balancing (HALB) is an appliance that provides load balancing for RAS Secure Client Gateways. A Parallels HALB appliance is a preconfigured virtual machine with the operating system installed and all relevant settings configured.

Parallels HALB appliance is available for the following hypervisors:

• Microsoft Hyper-V
• VMware
• Citrix Hypervisor

HALB deployment in Parallels RAS is per site, which means that a site must have at least one Parallels HALB appliance deployed. Since HALB is a single point of contact for the client software, it is recommended to have at least two HALB appliances per site for redundancy.

Multiple HALB deployments can run simultaneously, one acting as the master and others as slaves. The more HALB deployments a site has, the lower the probability that end users will experience downtime. Master and slave HALB deployments share a common or virtual IP address (VIP). Should the master HALB deployment fail, a slave is promoted to master and takes its place.

Note: Please note that when a slave HALB deployment is promoted to master, a user will experience two disconnects: one when the master HALB deployment goes down and one more time when it goes back up since VIP moves from one deployment to the other.

Setting up High Availability Load Balancing consists of the following steps:

1. Deploying a Parallels HALB appliance.
2. Configuring HALB in the RAS console.

Read on to learn how to download and deploy a Parallels HALB appliance.