How do I create Load Balanced Host Records?

This article assumes knowledge of the Ecessa appliance’s Authoritative DNS feature and Load Balanced Host Records. For additional information on these topics, please refer to the Inbound Load-Balancing and Authoritative DNS section in the Ecessa online manual and the Knowledge Base article What are Load Balanced Host Records and how do they work?

Navigate to the configuration page for the domain by going to Authoritative DNS in the web interface menu and then click Configure next to the appropriate domain.

In the following example, Simple Host Records have only been created for the primary WAN line which does not provide inbound load balancing or redundancy. 

To begin, modify the hostname for the current records, and add new records for the second IP address.  Typically, each record is distinguished by appending the number “1” to the records associated with the primary WAN appending the number “2” to the records associated with the secondary WAN line.  Once complete, be sure to click the “Activate” button.

In our example below, the previous records were updated and additional records created for the second WAN line IP addresses

Load Balanced Host Records are then created for load-balancing and failover. Click on the “Add Host” button under the Load Balance Host Records section.  For the host name, this the actual name you wish to resolve (such as “www”).  Once the host name is entered, choose the simple host records that will be associated with this hostname for load-balancing or failover.  For example, the “www1” entry and the “www2” entry will be selected from the list for the “www” load balanced host record.  This process is repeated for each load balanced record.  Click the Activate button to save the changes.

In our example, all DNS queries for the load balanced hostname will resolve in a round-robin fashion.  However, if it is desired that certain records are resolved to a single, primary address while the secondary address(es) are only used for failover, the “Redundant Only” setting should be enabled for the appropriate records.

The Ecessa appliance will resolve the load-balanced record according to the order that the associated A records are listed. To change the order of the records, the position of the simple host records must be changed. Click the entry number for the entry to be re-ordered and a menu should be displayed allowing the record to move up or down in the list.  After the simple host record have been ordered, click the Update Canonicals button under the load balanced host records and reselect the two entries for each of the affected load balance records.  Click the Activate button to save the changes.