Looking to upgrade Kemp LoadMaster in a High Availability (HA) mode? Our guide is focused on simplicity and practicality.

In the previous part, the article focused on the design of HA SMTP relay solutions. It also outlined the steps you should take to correctly prepare for setting up. In this part, you will get the detailed step-by-step guide on how to actually set up the solution without any trouble. The process is cumbersome but manageable.

This article is part one of a two-part series on configuring a highly available, on-premises SMTP relay solution. In this part, we discuss the design and do all the preparational work before setting up the actual SMTP relay solution in part two.

In Part I of this article, we discussed how to handle multiple SSL sites sharing the same IP address and port bound to multiple SSL certificates in regards to SNI decryption and re-encryption with Kemp LoadMaster. We discussed briefly how to achieve this creatively. With Kemp LoadMaster, you will need to leverage sub-virtual services (SubVSs) in combination with content rules to handle this scenario. We also use SSL decryption and re-encryption in order to support the clients and servers with different TLS versions. Re-encryption is handled at the virtual service (VS) level, not at the SubVS level. Meaning you can only enter one SNI name for re-encryption with a shared VIP. So, in the case of two or more SSL sites sharing the same IP address, you would have only one that works.

As you all know by now, it really is time to say goodbye to TLS 1.0/1.1. You might be ready to only offer and support TLS 1.2. Perhaps you can even add TLS 1.3 as well. Being able and willing to block TLS 1.0/1.1 is a good thing completely. Well done.

KEMP’s main product is LoadMaster, a load balancer, which allows you to work with dozens of web applications. The problem is that some web resources do not include an authentication form, as for example SSO. Therefore, moving to these applications through Kemp, the security of your data is at risk. But don’t worry! ESP or Edge Security Pack is an authentication form provided by Kemp and presented to clients before accessing the web applications.

A reverse proxy is a service that sits in front of one or more servers and accepts requests from clients for resources that are located on the server or servers. From a client point of view, a reverse proxy looks like a web server and can be easily used for remote access. The Kemp LoadMaster platform provides reverse proxy services that expand the range of workloads and provide access to dozens of web applications via a single IP address/port. Set up a reverse proxy server on the LoadMaster and get the perfect point in the network to control traffic and optimize performance!

A Kemp LoadMaster appliance is a critical service for load balancing and application content delivery. Thanks to flexible deployment options for a wide range of hypervisors and cloud platforms, Kemp LoadMaster allows you to distribute user traffic and improve application performance in private and hybrid cloud systems intelligently and efficiently. At the same time, usually Kemp is in front of critical services such as E-mail, web applications, SharePoint and if you lose it, you’ll get service outage. Deploying an HA cluster will solve this problem and provide a high availability, especially for a physical appliance!

Kemp provides a product called LoadMaster that provides a load balancer. Load Master is available in physical and virtual appliances. The virtual appliance is also called VLM (Virtual LoadMaster). LoadMaster can be deployed either in On-Prem and in Microsoft Azure. Today I wanted to show you how to deploy a VLM and the first configuration steps.