1 Introduction

Kemp leads the industry in driving the price/performance value proposition for application delivery and load balancing to levels that our customers can afford. Our products' versatile and powerful architecture provide the highest value, while enabling our customers to optimize their businesses that rely on Internet-based infrastructure to conduct business with their customers, employees and partners.

Kemp products optimize web and application infrastructure as defined by high-availability, high-performance, flexible scalability, security and ease of management. They maximize the total cost-of-ownership for web infrastructure, while enabling flexible and comprehensive deployment options.

1.1 Document Purpose

This document describes how to create Virtual Services. It also outlines the templates feature of the Kemp LoadMaster.

1.2 Intended Audience

This document is intended to help anyone who wishes to learn about or create Virtual Services within the Kemp LoadMaster.

2 Create a Simple Virtual Service

This section outlines the steps required to create a simple Virtual Service that has two Real Servers.

 To begin the process of creating a new Virtual Service, first select the Virtual Services and Add New in the main menu.

This opens the Virtual Service parameters page which prompts to enter the Virtual IP (VIP) address of the Virtual Service, the port and the name to give the service and the protocol.

The port number is usually 80 for HTTP services. The protocol may be TCP or UDP, but in the vast majority of cases TCP is the one used.

Click Add This Virtual Service to open the Virtual Service properties screen.

In this document, we are not concerned with most of these values and will create a Virtual Service with no persistence, no content switching and Round Robin as the scheduling method, which are the default settings.

The final action to be performed is adding Real Servers or Sub-Virtual Services (SubVSs). This document refers to the creation of Real Servers. For further information on SubVSs, refer to the SubVS, Feature Description document on the Kemp Documentation Page. To get to the Real Server parameters page, expand the Real Servers sections and click Add New... Here we specify the IP address of the Real Server we wish to add, the port and forwarding method it is to use and its relative weight.

 Enter the Real Server IP address Click Add This Real Server to finish. Click OK to the message.

The Add a Real Server screen appears again. To add another Real Server, repeat the process but with a different Real Server IP address.

 All changes are made in real-time. To see a summary of Virtual Services created; select the View/Modify Services link in the Virtual Services section of the main menu on the left. The Virtual Service table should now list the Real Servers just created.

3 Virtual Service Templates

Adding Virtual Services can be both repetitive and prone to error when being performed over multiple LoadMasters. Kemp have developed a general template mechanism that will allow consistency and ease of use when creating Virtual Services. 

Using templates to set up and configure a Virtual Service is a two-stage process. Initially the templates must be imported into the LoadMaster. When imported, the templates can then be used when adding a new Virtual Service.

Templates can be imported and installed on the LoadMaster through the Manage Templates screen. For more information regarding this screen, please refer to the Web User Interface (WUI), Configuration Guide document on the Kemp Documentation Page.

When adding a new Virtual Service, a template can be selected from the list of available templates in the Use Template drop-down list. Selecting a template may fill in the port and protocol of the Virtual Service. The values prepopulated by the template can be overridden, but may be ignored depending on the template. When the Add this Virtual Service button is clicked, the Virtual Service is created and a number of other attributes of the Virtual Service are automatically configured by the template. Once loaded, the Virtual Service may be modified in the same way as manually created Virtual Services. 

Templates released by Kemp can be downloaded from the Kemp documentation page, http://kemptechnologies.com/documentation.

It is also possible to create your own templates by exporting Virtual Service settings. To do this, go to Virtual Services > View/Modify Services, click Modify on the relevant Virtual Service and then click the Export Template button. The template is exported as a .txt file. It is possible to bundle multiple template files into one gzipped, tar file. This allows multiple templates to be imported at the same time.

When exporting a Virtual Service template in which the Virtual Service uses a custom Cipher Set, the LoadMaster on which the template is imported must include the same custom Cipher Set.

When you export a Virtual Service as a template, it is provided with a default name and comment. If desired, the template text file can be modified to include a more useful name and comment. Template names can be up to 126 characters long. Template comments can be up to 1023 characters long.

There is a Kemp Certified column on the Manage Templates screen. The Certified column will indicate whether the template was supplied by Kemp or not. If a template is certified, it has been provided by Kemp. If a template is not certified, it might be a template created by you (by exporting a Virtual Service).

4 Virtual Service Permissions

There are varying levels of permissions that you can assign to users regarding Virtual Service operations. For further information, refer to the User Management Feature Description on the Kemp Documentation Page.

References

Unless otherwise specified, the following documents can be found at http://kemptechnologies.com/documentation.

SubVS, Feature Description

Web User Interface (WUI), Configuration Guide

 

Last Updated Date

This document was last updated on 21 February 2022.