Route Health Injection

Route Health Injection (RHI) is an optimized version of a third party software that allows for the control of routing protocol announcement based on the health of the network and the HAProxy Enterprise service for active/active clustering.

Install the RHI module

Install RHI using your package manager:

# On Debian/Ubuntu
$ apt install install hapee-extras-rhi

# On CentOS/RedHat
$ yum install install hapee-extras-rhi

# On SUSE
$ zypper install install hapee-extras-rhi

Make sure that you configured the HAProxy Enterprise socket, which enables the Runtime API, and which RHI uses to analyze the status of proxies and backends:
```
global
   stats socket /var/run/hapee-1.8/hapee-lb.sock user hapee-lb group hapee mode 660 level admin
```
Update the RHI settings to point to the socket's path by adding the following line to the file /etc/default/hapee-extras-rhi:
```
HAPEE_LB_SOCKET="/var/run/hapee-2.1/hapee-lb.sock"
```

Enable and start the RHI service:

$ sudo systemctl enable hapee-extras-rhi
$ sudo systemctl start hapee-extras-rhi

How RHI works

RHI comprises two layers:

The hapee-extras-route daemons (one for IPv4 and one for IPv6) interact with the infrastructure's core routing system.
The hapee-extras-rhi daemon analyzes the status of frontends or backends managed by HAProxy Enterprise and updates route daemons following the rules described in its configuration.

The diagram below shows these interactions:
The hapee-extras-rhi daemon checks the proxies every second.
A proxy is considered as failing after three consecutive DOWN statuses.
When HAProxy Enterprise is reloaded after a proxy is removed (but still checked), then hapee-1.8-rhi carries on using the last status reported for the missing proxy.

Manage the RHI process

$ sudo service hapee-extras-route {start,stop,restart}
$ sudo service hapee-extras-route6 {start,stop,restart}

Configure route

HAProxy Enterprise's bird version embeds a new protocol named volatile, which you declare in the configuration file /etc/hapee-extras/hapee-route.cfg, as follows:

protocol volatile <protoname> {
  [GATEWAY <ip>]
}

where:

`<protoname>`	The name of the volatile protocol section. It is a label that the RHI daemon uses to inject routes. The default value is vol1.
`GATEWAY <ip>` (optional)	You can force a network gateway. By default, it uses the gateway configured on the interface to announce the routes.

Manage the RHI daemon process

$ sudo service hapee-extras-rhi {start,stop,restart,reload}

Configure the RHI daemon

To configure the RHI daemon, edit the file /etc/hapee-extras-rhi.conf.

This file contains a list of routes to annoulnce based on rules. A rule is an aggregation of a proxy's status check (frontend or backend).

Define a rule

<network>[,<network>,[...]] = <agg>(<frt-or-bck>[,<frt-or-bck>,[...]])

<network>

an IPv4 or IPv6 CIDR subnet. If none is provided, hapee-1.8-rhi applies a /32 {<ipv4>,<ipv6>}[/<mask>][%<protoname>]

At least one network is required, but several can be announced. The separator is the comma ,
For advanced configuration, you can supply the name of a volatile protocol in the %<protoname> section (default is vol1)

Character =

splits the network list from the rule

To announce the listed networks, the rule must be valid.

The rule is an aggregation of conditions. A rule starts by a keyword either all, always or never followed by a list of proxies.

all: all proxies listed must be active in order to announce the routes
any: at least one of the proxies listed must be active in order to announce the routes
never: never announce the routes, whatever the status of the proxies listed. Used for debugging purposes
always: always announce the routes, whatever the status of the proxies listed. Used for debugging purposes

Description of proxies {b,f}:<name>

a letter to indicate the proxy type: f stands for frontend and b stands for backend
a separator, the colon :
<name>: a string representing the name of the proxy in the HAProxy Enterprise configuration

Example RHI configuration

To announce the IP address 10.200.200.200/32 when the backends be_static and be_app are available, add the following line into hapee-extras-rhi configuration file:

10.200.200.200/32 = all(b:be_static,b:be_app)

Next up

Realtime cluster-wide tracking