Configuring Reverse Proxy for Load-balancing

Web Server 7.0 provides a sophisticated built-in load balancer, the reverse proxy. A reverse proxy is a gateway for Web Servers in a server farm. By configuring reverse proxy, the requests are forwarded to multiple similarly configured web servers

Use the following procedure to enable reverse proxy in Web Server 7.0:

1. Install Web Server on the node that you want to use for configuring reverse proxy.

2. Create a configuration. For example, rp.

3. Using the Administration Console, select Configurations > Virtual Servers > Content Handling > Reverse Proxy tab. Click the New button.

4. Enter the reverse proxy URI and the server URLs of all the machines in the cluster separated by comma.

   The format for entering the server URL is hostname:portnumber.

5. Save the changes.

6. Deploy the modified configuration to apply the changes to the configuration.

7. Start all the instance of this modified configuration.

This completes configuring reverse proxy for load balancing HTTP requests.

To configure a reverse proxy in a cluster environment, issue a wildcard server certificate or the alternate subject names that can be set to the actual origin server host names. The other option of specifying the original server's host names in the subject name field limits the size of the cluster, leading the cluster to fail if another node is added to the cluster.

A wildcard server certificate can be created using the administration interfaces. After creating the server certificate use certutil to get the base64 encoded version of the certificate and install it as a trusted CA certificate on the load balancer configuration.

Type the following command to generate the base64 encoded certificate bash$./certutil -L -a -d instancedir/config. Copy the output of the command and paste it in the install certificate wizard.