Overview

The Load Balancer or Application Delivery Controller is a consolidation solution for applications, networks and services that is used as a control panel of the application delivery, security and high availability. For that reason, it’s a key component in your network which it’s recommended to perform maintenance and operation tasks to ensure the correct behavior in such aspects.

Maintenance Best Practices

Find below the best practices for operation and maintenance of Zevenet load balancer in the aspects of application delivery, security and high availability:

[APPLICATION DELIVERY] Keep your Zevenet LB updated to the last hotfix of your release (at least). Applying the hotfixes of a release (third number of the version number) ensures to be safe of bugs or not optimized processes in Zevenet. There are several ways of being aware of these updates:
         1. Receiving the official quarterly newsletter for all the supported teams, or registering to the public newsletter.
         2. Ensure to have the APT repository configured and enabled. For that, ensure to have the minimum version (5.2.11) from the Support Portal ZVN Central section Knowledge > Enterprise Edition > Binaries
         3. Checking the Dashboard > News section in the appliance, where it’s published the current latest release.
         4. Checking the official timeline
         5. Checking our social networks in twitter, linkedin or facebook

[SECURITY] Keep your Zevenet LB updated with the latest security patches with the Security Analyzer package in order to fix all the security vulnerabilities and detection of weak configurations, specially important for SSL services. The Security Analyzer has it’s own release version and there are several ways of being aware of updates:
         1. For users with any of our Support Services will receive Security Advisories when there is an update of the Security Analyzer package and the vulnerability is a critical threat.
         2. Checking our social networks, every security advisory and new releases will be announced.
         3. Checking in the official Support Portal ZVNCentral section Knowledge > Enterprise Edition > Binaries
         4. Having up to date Intrusion Prevention and Detection System Zevenet module from high reputation sources

[HIGH AVAILABILITY] If a cluster is built, force a failover, during a planned service window, to verify the correct replication of sessions if persistence is configured and the networks and virtual service switches correctly without downtime.

[APPLICATION DELIVERY] Monitoring the health care of the system resources analyzing the most important metrics and graphs patterns. This should be an starting point to study the reasons of every wrong or weird behaviors in the application delivery traffic. The Monitoring section in the web GUI could be used, or configure the SNMP service for custom metrics (like Nagios or Zabbix) and the use of the Zevenet API to ask for specific values of the load balancer. For example, we recommend to check:
         1. Disk Space of the appliance
         2. Memory used
         3. CPU used
         4. Concurrent connections
         5. Network bandwidth

[HIGH AVAILABILITY] For disaster recovery plans, it’s recommended to automate configuration backups of the appliance when important changes have been applied.

Don’t doubt to contact with our Team for further information.