[RHEL6] LVS failover not working with UDP packets. How to fix it?

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
  • Load Balance Add On

Issue

  • Ipvs is not recognizing when a UDP based service fail and is not performing failover. How to fix it?

Resolution

To work with UDP packets you need to include some special parameters in /etc/sysctl.conf and set ipvsadm timeouts, in order to get IPVS perform failover correctly to UDP based services.

1. Set ipvsadm timeout to 1 (or the value you need):

# ipvsadm --set <tcp> <tcpfin> <udp>  (see man ipvsadm for info)

 --set tcp tcpfin udp
              Change the timeout values used for IPVS connections. This command always takes 3 parameters,  representing  the  timeout  values (in seconds) for
              TCP sessions, TCP sessions after receiving a  FIN packet, and  UDP  packets, respectively.  A timeout value 0  means  that  the  current  timeout
              value of the  corresponding  entry  is preserved.

2. Edit /etc/sysctl.conf and set to 1 the following parameters:

net.ipv4.vs.expire_nodest_conn =1
net.ipv4.vs.expire_quiescent_template =1

Or do it executing 'echo 1' on the entries:

/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/expire_nodest_conn
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/vs/expire_quiescent_template

3. Perform a test sending request to the UDP service and check if all requests are being balanced. After that, set weight=0 to the UDP service and check if requests are redirect to the other real server.

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