Load balance for ECP servers

Question

Question

Victor Tamotsu · Mar 2, 2017

#Beginner #Caché #ECP

Has anyone ever worked with a load balance for ECP servers access? If yes, wich one?

What are the pros and cons of such a solution? We use ECP servers as data servers via ODBC, thanks!

Discussion (7)0

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Alexey Maslov · Mar 6, 2017

Several years ago our company (SP.ARM) had developed Krasnoyarsk Kray Regional HIS, which was finally deployed using haproxy to balance CacheActiveX traffic load among 7 ECP application servers. This kind of traffic is based on the same protocol as ODBC, so the behavior should be quite the same (long sessions via 1972/tcp). To achieve high availability of the proxy server, it was deployed in two similar copies connected with ucarp.

Our initial solution for load balancing and high availability of proxy was based on LVS+keepalived, but the engineers of maintainer company (Rostelecom) prefered to use haproxy+ucarp as they felt themselves more comfortable with them; we didn't mind.

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Fabio Goncalves · Mar 6, 2017

Hi Victor,

There is a customer in Brazil which is using HAProxy and KeepAlived to set up high availability for their load balancers. They currently have 2 HAProxy servers (primary an secondary) 4 ECP servers and 1 DB server. They currently are load balancing all connections ODBC, JDBC, etc. with this solution. They are managing/load balancing approximately 5.000 user connections. I can manage to put you in contact with the customer in order to help you with some question about the architecture or configuration.

I hope it helps.

Regards.

Fábio Gonçalves.

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score 0 · Answer 1 · 2017-03-02T09:28:57-05:00

Please clarify your architecture. When ECP is involved there are usually at least 2 Cache instances. One is an "ECP application server" and the other is an "ECP data server".

What Cache instance are your ODBC clients connecting to?

Where are you wanting to add load balancing?

score 0 · Answer 2 · 2017-03-02T12:01:02-05:00

Hi, thanks for the reply.

I have two ECP application servers connected in a ECP data server. The ODBC clients are connected to my two ECP application servers and I want do load balance of their connections.

My servers runs in Windows Server 2008 R2. I am wondering if someone has alreadey used a load balance solution, like Microsoft NLB or HAProxy, for this cenario.

score 0 · Answer 3 · 2017-03-03T10:33:04-05:00

Thanks Dmitry! I'm gonna study HAproxy and test in my envoriment.

Does anyone already used HAproxy for ODBC connections in Caché?

score 1 · Answer 4 · 2017-03-03T10:10:34-05:00

I would recommend looking at HAProxy, I've used it only for HTTP, with about 10 ECP application servers. But while it can work with binary protocols as well, I think it should be useful. Quite easy to configure and monitor it.

score 0 · Answer 5 · 2017-03-06T07:29:11-05:00

Wow, thanks for your feedback! With your case I can study the use of load balance for ODBC hopeful.