uid-0: The load-balancing with HAProxy and Control-M agents

HAProxy is well known as a tool for HTTP(S) protocols, but not every knows it can also work as the load balancer for other TCP traffic. Can we use it with applications like BMC Control-M? Let me try to answer the question.

BMC Control-M has features like Host Groups and Host Restrictions (based on current CPU utilization and/or number of jobs) which are recommended ways for load-balancing jobs. However, since the Fix Packs 1 (for Enterprise Manager, Server and Agent), Control-M 8 supports network load-balancing routers which also can be useful.

So, now it is up to your IT infrastructure and your IT scenarios which load-balancing mechanisms you can use or you prefer to use. I can also imagine that both of the ways, or even three ways if you think of Control-M's quantitative and control resources, may be used at the same time.

But let's go back to HAProxy.

In the simplest scenario we may have one load balancer (e.g. rh65haproxy) and two hosts (let's call them rh65haproxyA and rh65haproxyB) which are behind the LB router.

The configuration may look like below (in the file /etc/haproxy/haproxy.conf):

listen controlm *:7006
mode tcp
option tcplog
balance leastconn

server rh65haproxyA 192.168.10.54:7006 check
server rh65haproxyB 192.168.10.55:7006 check

Of course, this is a very basic sample only. HAProxy can be much more powerful utility and has a lot more features which can be set up. I would consider e.g. more of the server options (for example - the weight option) and also the use-server commands (in a case of more complex infrastructure or fail-over scenarios).

If you are the Red Hat systems user, the good news are that HAProxy is already a part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Back to our scenario, after we set up the load balancer, the network load-balancing support feature must be enabled in the Control-M Configuration Manager. We have to go Control-M/EM System Parameters and look for the EnableLoadBalancerRouter parameter:

After recycling the Control-M Configuration Server we can define components of the new class - Network Load Balancer Router:

In the Control-M GUI (Monitoring) user interface, the network load-balancing looks like Host Groups, but "under the skin" it's a bit different from that: