Termidesk Connect 1.3 Load Balancer: even more fault tolerance, performance, and configuration flexibility

Uveon – Cloud Technologies (part of Astra Group) has released an update to its load balancer Termidesk Connect 1.3.

Administrators now have the ability to flexibly configure conditions for automatic failover between high-availability (HA) cluster nodes. Instead of a simple "active — not active" scheme, granular criteria can now be set, taking into account service status, network availability, and metric threshold values. This minimizes the risk of false failovers (split-brain) and delayed responses to actual failures, which is critical in areas where load balancer downtime can lead to unavailability of the entire IT infrastructure: in the financial sector, state information systems, and industrial enterprises with continuous production cycles.

Termidesk Connect 1.3 supports Proxy Protocol – a standard mechanism for transmitting the client's original IP address and port to the server. This information remains "visible" when balancing TCP connections, even if communication is routed through intermediate proxy layers. This allows for proper access logging, enforcement of security policies based on IP addresses, and compliance with regulatory requirements for auditing and logging without additional architectural workarounds.

At the data link (L2) and network (L3) layers, support for Direct Server Return has been implemented. In this mode, response traffic from servers is sent directly to the client, bypassing the load balancer, which removes throughput limitations for outbound traffic. For video streaming, large file transfers, and applications with asymmetric traffic patterns, this provides a multiple-fold increase in throughput. As a result, significantly more users can be served without upgrading the load balancer platform.

When configuring virtual servers and pools, port ranges can now be specified instead of just individual ports. This makes it much easier to configure SIP telephony, multimedia streams, game servers, and complex microservice applications – services that use multiple ports. Moreover, instead of hundreds of individual rules, a single rule can be created, reducing the likelihood of errors and cutting down configuration time.

The web management interface now includes built-in tools for visualizing real-time statistics: current connections, load distribution, and server status within pools.

Termidesk Connect 1.3 allows bandwidth limiting for both incoming traffic from users and outgoing traffic from balanced servers, protecting the infrastructure from overloads and misuse. It helps prevent situations where a single "noisy" client or server monopolizes the channel. This is especially valuable when ensuring the uninterrupted operation of multiple services or controlling outbound traffic.

A new rebalancing mechanism can redistribute already established connections between servers when the pool composition or status changes. If a new server is added or a previously failed node is restored, the load remains even, and there is no need to wait for old connections to close naturally. This solves the problem of "hot" servers and optimizes resource utilization. However, the functionality does not end there. A key scenario for ensuring service availability is the ability to redirect a user's request to another server in the pool if the first node responds incorrectly.

The set of client-to-server affinity methods has been expanded: in addition to classic IP-address and cookie-based mechanisms, new types have been added that account for the specifics of various software and protocols. Users of stateful applications that store session data on servers now benefit from more precise and reliable session persistence mechanisms. This is critical for ERPs, e-service portals, and other business software where losing the connection to the server results in loss of user context.

Finally, the new version adds support for Cloud-Init – a standard mechanism for initial automatic configuration of virtual machines in cloud environments. This helps automate the deployment of Termidesk Connect in various private and public clouds, including those based on OpenStack. This paves the way for fully automated DevOps/IaC pipelines, reducing infrastructure launch time from hours to minutes and making configurations reproducible.

«The release of the new version of Termidesk Connect is a response to the requests of our customers, who use the load balancer as a critical element of their IT landscape», commented Denis Mukhin, Director of Virtualization and Cloud Services at Astra Group. — «We focused on three areas: fault tolerance and predictable behavior in cluster scenarios, secure secret management, and flexibility when operating in cloud and hybrid environments. Each innovation is not technology for technology's sake, but a solution to a specific and real practical task.»