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.

How RHI works

RHI comprises two layers:

  • hapee-extras-route daemons (one for IPv4 and one for IPv6) to interact with the infrastructure core routing system

  • hapee-extras-rhi daemon that analyzes HAProxy proxie's status (front ends or back ends) and updates route daemons following the rules described in its configuration

    The diagram below shows these interactions:

    HAProxy Enterprise Route Health Injection

  • hapee-extras-rhi checks HAProxy's proxies every second.

  • A proxy is considered as failing after 3 consecutive DOWN statuses.

  • When hapee-1.9-lb (HAProxy) is reloaded after a proxy is removed (but still checked), then hapee-1.9-rhi carries on using the last status reported for the missing proxy.

Install the RHI module

The RHI module is not installed with HAProxy Enterprise by default.

  1. Install RHI using your package manager:

    $ sudo apt install hapee-extras-rhi

  2. 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-2.1/hapee-lb.sock user hapee-lb group hapee mode 660 level admin

  3. Update the RHI settings to point to the socket's path by editing the file '/etc/default/hapee-extras-rhi' to add the following line:

    HAPEE_LB_SOCKET="/var/run/hapee-2.1/hapee-lb.sock"

  4. Enable and start the RHI service as follows:

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

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, you 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 HAProxy's proxies 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-1.9-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 HAProxy's 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 HAProxy's 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)