Configuring NSX Advanced Loadbalancer Basic Edition for VMware AppVolumes

VMware generally recommends using load balancer for VMware Horizon components to increase availability and scalability (https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2146312).

In this post a AppVolumes Server load balancer will be set up for users with NSX ALB Basic Edition license. If you already own an Enterprise license of NSX ALB you can optionally use Advanced Features. The setup for Enterprise Edition license holders is documented at the AVI documentation page here: 

https://avinetworks.com/docs/latest/configure-avi-vantage-for-vmware-horizon/.

Loadbalancing for AppVolumes is very important as without any Apps the production for the VDI platform is often down or affected. There is an alternative high availability mode for AppVolumes based on AppVolumes Agents registry keys. But this mode connects to one load balancer at the same time only. Timeout has to occur, which allows low level fault tolerance only. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2091836

 

The general setup of NSX ALB is documented in this blog post: https://phisiescloud.com/2022/12/configuring-nsx-advanced-basic-edition.html

 

Create a new virtual Service

Select Advanced Setup, select a cloud and select a Routing context which is valid for your UseCase. How To create a cloud and a Routing context can be identified using the blog post above.

The TCP/ UDP profile is the default TCP-Proxy profile. The application profile is a custom one which is located below:

Application profile

Create Poolmember configuration

The following pool configuration will be used. You should install at least 2 AppVolumes servers.

Choose the appropriate logical router for your environment.

Pool member and timing configuration. Add the poolmember by IP and optional add an hostname. It is not allowed to add it by hostname only because that is not covered in the Basic license.

Create Custom health monitor configuration

A custom health monitor will be implemented to check AppVolumes servers health status.

That’s it. Click on save and the load balancer and service engines will be created