SuperTekBoy

The Kemp Load Balancers are a fantastic series of products. Just this month, Kemp announced that it is offering a free virtual load balancer.

The free load balancer is great for a lab, proof of concept, or, small production environment. Be sure to check out our review here.

Given this fantastic offer–and the fact we were already huge Kemp fans–we decided to start a series on configuring Kemp load balancers for Exchange.

In part one, we look at how to deploy the free virtual load balancer from an OVF template. We will deploy this to our standalone ESXi 5.5 environment. In the second part of our series, we will configure the load balancer for Exchange 2013.

Disclaimer: I need to point out that I am not sponsored by Kemp in any way. However, this document does contain some affiliate links.

Deploy the OVF

To get your free virtual load balancer, visit, https://freeloadbalancer.com/. Once at Kemp’s site, you will need to register for a Kemp ID (if you don’t already have one). Also, be sure to confirm your email address from the activation message.

Once logged in, you will be asked to Select Your Platform. We are going to deploy to ESXi 5.5, so let’s pick VMware (OVF).

Download and extract the ZIP file to a convenient location. Inside this archive, you will find 4 files. The OVF and VMDK files are the ones we will import. To do this, connect with your VSphere Client, select the File menu and click Deploy OVF Template.