Tracking connections

Objective

The OVH Load Balancer service offers a number of ways of tracking connections to your services.

Each session on the OVH Load Balancer service is maintained by a persistent connection system. The system is configured on the application layer of the OVH Load Balancer service, and it maintains a persistent connection to the server.

This guide provides an introduction to the ways in which you can configure these options for the OVH Load Balancer.

This guide will show you a number of ways you can configure this option on the OVH Load Balancer.

Requirements

• an OVH Load Balancer
• access to the OVH Control Panel, or the OVH API

Instructions

The different types of connection tracking.

There are two main connection tracking methods that can be configured on your services:

Tracking connections	Details
Cookie	Configures a session cookie, which will be used to distribute traffic from a single HTTP session to the same server in the farm.
SourceIp	A hash algorithm will be applied to the source IP address of the request received by the OVH Load Balancer.

The following elements will affect traffic redirection:

• if the configured weight changes
• if a server in the farm is re-enabled
• if a server in the farm is no longer responding

Modify a server farm’s connection tracking method via the OVH Control Panel.

To modify connection tracking for a farm, you need to edit it by going to the Server clusters section (1 on the screenshot below), then click the ... edit button (2 on the screenshot below) for the farm you want to edit, and click Edit (3 on the screenshot below):

In the Advanced settings, you will be able to access the Track session section:

Once you have configured the farm, click Add or Edit, depending on whether you are configuring a new or existing farm. Please remember to deploy the configuration.

There are two ways of doing this:

• via the Status section of the OVH Control Panel, by clicking on your Load Balancer’s ... button, then selecting Apply configuration

• via the reminder box in the OVH Control Panel, notifying you that the configuration has not been applied, by clicking Apply configuration

Modify a server farm’s connection tracking method via the API.

View details on a server farm.

With this call instruction, you can view details on a server farm if you know its ID. In this example, we will work on a HTTP farm.

Setting	Meaning
serviceName*	Your Load Balancer service ID
farmId*	The farm’s ID number

Response (BackendHttp)	Meaning
farmId	The farm’s ID number
balance	Balance type currently enabled for the farm
zone	Name of the zone in which the farm is configured
port	Port used to contact the servers configured on the farm
probe	Type of probe currently configured on the farm
displayName	Name given to this farm
stickiness	Connection tracking method currently set for the farm

Modify a server farm’s connection tracking method.

With this call instruction, you can edit the settings of a server farm if you know its ID. In this example, we will work on a HTTP farm. To modify the tracking method, the BackendHttp.stickiness field must be updated with an available connection tracking method:

Setting	Meaning
serviceName*	Your Load Balancer service ID
farmId*	The farm’s ID number
BackendHttp.stickiness	Connection tracking method chosen for the farm

Apply the modifications.

Setting	Meaning
serviceName*	Your Load Balancer service ID
zone	Name of the zone in which to deploy the configuration, e.g. "all" or "rbx"

Go further

Join our community of users on https://community.ovh.com/en/.

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