SafeKit: Microsoft Azure Load Balancing & Application High Availability Farm Cluster

SafeKit provides network load balancing and high availability for Azure across two or more nodes.

This article explains how to quickly implement a Azure cluster without requiring specialized High Availability (HA) expertise.

The solution works by integrating SafeKit's application health checks with a virtual IP defined at the Azure load balancer level. By configuring specific application service names and application checkers, SafeKit ensures the load balancer only directs traffic to healthy, operational applications.

SafeKit enables network load balancing and automatic failover, delivering seamless scalability and continuous service availability for your mission-critical applications.

How does SafeKit handle Uniform Deployment and the Cloud Virtual IP?

SafeKit is a cloud-agnostic solution, ensuring that the deployment process and architecture remain consistent across on-premises servers and all major cloud providers. The primary architectural difference lies in how the Virtual IP (VIP) is presented to the network:

• On-Premises: SafeKit manages VIP load balancing directly on the application servers using efficient kernel-level filtering. Failover is handled by sending GARP (Gratuitous ARP) packets to local switches, which reassigns the IP to the active nodes instantaneously.
• In the Cloud: Because cloud networks do not support GARP, the Virtual IP is hosted by a Cloud Load Balancer. In this configuration, SafeKit provides the intelligent health checks required to determine node status. This enables the Load Balancer to detect active nodes in real-time and route traffic automatically, ensuring seamless failover across Availability Zones.

Why choose a unified All-in-One HA solution over fragmented tools?

Unlike "bolt-on" solutions that combine separate products for clustering, SafeKit integrates Virtual IP, Network Load Balancing, Automatic Failover, Automatic Failback and Synchronous Real-time File Replication into a single engine.

This eliminates the "house of cards" risk where updates break fragile links between disparate tools, provides a single point of accountability for the entire HA stack, and reduces human error by providing a single interface for Azure application HA.

Is it possible to set up a Azure farm cluster without clustering skills?

Yes. This article explains how to quickly implement a Azure farm cluster without the need for specialized and complex clustering skills. By using SafeKit’s health checks to handle the Virtual IP network load balancing and SafeKit's application monitoring and restart, you get a robust scalable solution that is significantly simpler to deploy and maintain than traditional NLB clustering solutions.

Beyond Azure, which applications and environments can SafeKit protect?

SafeKit is a versatile high-availability solution for both Windows and Linux that extends far beyond Azure farm cluster. It enables mirror clusters with synchronous real-time replication and automatic failover for a wide range of critical workloads, including:

• Virtual & Physical Environments: Complete Hyper-V or KVM virtual machines.
• Container Orchestration: Docker, Podman, and K3s (Kubernetes) environments.
• Data & Services: Individual file directories, services, and various databases.
• Cloud Infrastructure: High availability for Cloud applications.

Explore the full list of supported HA solutions here.

The SafeKit farm cluster is designed for high availability and scalability of services. The configuration focuses on distributing incoming traffic across both nodes simultaneously:

• Load Balanced Services (Macros tab): Define the specific application services (e.g., Apache, IIS, Nginx) to be kept active on all nodes.
• Heartbeat network(s): Communication path(s) used to detect if a node has left the farm.
• Virtual IP (Farm VIP): For on-premises deployment, configure the VIP directly in the SafeKit web console. For cloud deployment, configure the Virtual IP in the Cloud Load Balancer using SafeKit's health check.
• Load Balancing Rules: For on-premises deployment, configure the traffic distribution policy based on the source IP address or port in the SafeKit web console. For cloud deployment, configure the policy in the Cloud Load Balancer.
• Checkers: Monitor the application's health and trigger automatic restart if a process failure is detected.

Monitoring a farm cluster provides visibility into the Active-Active nature of the infrastructure, where all nodes contribute to the application's performance (showing 2 nodes in this example):

• UP State (50% on 2 nodes): In a healthy farm, both nodes are in the "UP" (50%) state, meaning they are both actively receiving and processing client requests via the shared Virtual IP.
• Automatic Re-balancing: If one node fails, the console visually shows the remaining node taking 100% of the traffic. The failover delay depends on the Cloud load balancer's health check polling interval.
• Node Insertion: When a repaired node is restarted, it transitions from "STOP" to "UP" and automatically starts receiving its portion of the load without administrator intervention.
• No Data Sync: Note that in a farm cluster, there is no "Orange" resynchronization state, as nodes are expected to be stateless or share a backend database (which can be protected separately in a mirror cluster).

Beyond simple status icons, the interface provides one-click node management, allowing you to manually stop or start a node for planned maintenance while the shared Virtual IP automatically redistributes traffic without interrupting user activity.