Think-Cube / VagrantHaProxy

Vagrant setup for HAProxy and Apache servers, facilitating easy deployment of a high availability proxy with load-balanced Apache instances

Vagrant HaProxy

This repository hosts a Vagrant setup for HAProxy and Apache web servers. It enables easy deployment of a high availability proxy along with two Apache servers for load balancing. Detailed usage instructions are provided, facilitating setup, configuration changes, and management of the virtual environment.

Host port	Guest machine	Guest port	Notes
8080	haproxy	8080	HAProxy Admin Interface
8081	haproxy	80	Load Balanced Apache

• It installs Apache on the two servers, configures it with a index page that identifies which host you're viewing the page on.
• It installs HAProxy on the separate host, and drops a configuration file in place with the two webservers pre-configured. It doesn't require HAProxy to be the default gateway because it NAT's the source IP as well as the destination IP.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have the following installed on your machine:

• Vagrant
• VirtualBox

• Vagrant Reload Provisioner - open powershell console and run "vagrant plugin install vagrant-reload"

How to use?

1. Clone https://github.com/Think-Cube/VagrantHaProxy.git
2. Open 3 terminal windows, one for each host
3. Terminal #1, run vagrant up haproxy && vagrant ssh haproxy
4. Terminal #2, run vagrant up web1 && vagrant ssh web1
5. Terminal #3, run vagrant up web2 && vagrant ssh web2
6. Open up http://localhost:8080/haproxy?stats in your host's browser. This is the HAProxy admin interface.
7. Open up http://localhost:8081/ in your host's browser. This is the load balanced interface to the two web servers. Note this is port forwarded via your actual host, and will be accessible via your externally accessible IP address - you can access test the load balancer from another workstation if you wish.
8. Open up http://172.55.33.11/ in a browser to see if web1's Apache is working.
9. Open up http://172.55.33.12/ in a browser to see if web2's Apache is working.
10. To see the Apache access logs on web1 and web2, run sudo tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log If you'd like to filter out the "pings" from the load balancer, run sudo tail -f /var/log/apache2/access.log | grep -v OPTIONS
11. To stop Apache on one of the webservers to simulate an outage, run sudo service apache2 stop To start it again, run sudo service apache2 start
12. To make changes to haproxy, edit the config file with sudo nano /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg When you want to apply the changes, run sudo service haproxy reload If you break things and want to reset back, just run sudo cp /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg.orig /etc/haproxy/haproxy.cfg && sudo service haproxy reload
13. When you're all done, type exit at the shell to get back to your local terminal.
14. To shut down the VM's, run vagrant halt web1 web2 haproxy
15. To remove the VM's from your hard drive, run vagrant destroy web1 web2 haproxy
16. If you wish to remove the cached image file from which these machines were created, run vagrant box remove precise32

Vagrant file includes

• Ha-Proxy
• 3x Ubuntu server