5.1

Configuring vFabric Web Server
Instances
27
VMware vFabric Suite 5.1 27
You have now configured load balancing for the two tc Runtime instance using the front-end vFabric Web Server.
What to do next
• For full reference documentation on the directives described in step 3, along with additional parameters you can use, see
Apache Module mod_proxy on the Apache Software Foundation Web site.
• Ensure that you can access your application through the vFabric Web Server instance, which in turn routes the request to
one of the tc Runtime instances. Do this by invoking your application in a browser, but specify the vFabric Web Server
instance rather than the tc Runtime instance. For example, if the URL to access the vFabric Web Server is http://
www.myhost.com, invoke the /my-app application using the following URL in your browser:
http://www.myhost.com/my-app
If you see your application, then you have correctly set up the vFabric Web Server instance to route requests to the /my-app
application to one of the two tc Runtime instances. The vFabric Web Server instance will also balance the load between the
two instances.
• If you enabled the balancer manager Web application, use it to watch and control load-balancing activity. Access the balancer
manager application by navigating to the following URL in your browser:
http://localhost:port/balancer-manager
where port is the port number of the vFabric Web Server instance (80 by default.) For security, the balancer manager
configuration allows access only to users who navigate to the application using a browser installed on the same computer on
which the vFabric Web Server instance is actually running.
Configure BMX for Monitoring vFabric Web Server Instances
As of version 5.1, all new vFabric Web Server instances are configured with BMX by default.
BMX is an Apache HTTPD framework that provides internal runtime information (performance metrics, status, configuration,
and current capacity) to monitoring applications such as vFabric Hyperic. In turn, these types of applications monitor the health
of vFabric Web Server instances by running BMX queries to gather metrics and configuration information.
New vFabric Web Server instances have the following default BMX configuration:
• Three main BMX modules (mod_bmx, mod_bmx_status, and mod_bmx_vhost) are all enabled. Together, these
modules provide overall runtime statistics of the Web Server instance, as well as the virtual hosts running within the instance.
• Access is allowed only to processes running on http://localhost (IP address 127.0.0.1), or in other words, only to
monitoring applications running on the same computer as the Web Server instance.
• Access requires no authentication.
• BMX access is enabled for all virtual hosts defined for the Web Server instance.
The default BMX configuration for vFabric Web Server instances make them immediately available for monitoring by
monitoring applications.
The BMX-related modules are loaded into the Web Server instance using appropriate LoadModule directives in the conf/
httpd.conf configuration file. Additional BMX configuration is in the conf/extra/httpd-info.conf file, which the
main conf/httpd.conf file includes using the Include conf/extra/httpd-info.conf directive.
Procedure
1. To disable BMX access to your vFabric Web Server instance, comment out the appropriate LoadModule directives in the
conf/httpd.conf configuration file for your instance as shown: