External Load Balancer not supported for VCF Operations for Networks Clusters

Products

• VCF Operations for Networks

Issue/Introduction

VCF Operations for Networks 9.x does not support an external HA load balancer between its platform nodes

Environment

VCF Operations for Networks 

Cause

Platform clustering is strictly a scale-out mechanism to accommodate high metrics volume.

 

Resolution

If you are looking to place the VCF Operations for Networks platform cluster behind an external load balancer to achieve High Availability (HA), this is not supported.

Here is how the architecture handles it instead:

Internal Load Balancing: All collector/proxy nodes must connect directly to the primary platform node (Platform1) over HTTPS (port 443).

• Platform1 receives these requests and acts as its own internal load balancer, distributing the workload to the other platform nodes in the cluster using a round-robin mechanism.

Why External HA isn't Supported:

• Certain configuration data is explicitly stored on the Platform1 node and is not replicated across the rest of the cluster.
  
  
• If Platform1 goes down, an external load balancer cannot simply reroute traffic to Platform2 or Platform3, which is why a traditional HA load-balancing setup is not supported for the platform nodes.

Additional Information

You also should not attempt to load balance the IP address for Platform1, because that is the IP address used to access the GUI.