Goal
Our customer needs a secure and flexible way to connect to different types of applications, such as Skype for Business, Exchange, Remote Desktop Services, the intranet, etc.
The solution must support application high availability, as well as be highly available itself. It also must be affordable and easy to manage.
Users are geographically dispersed and use on-premises or Cloud services from different time zones. Users require services to be highly available and accessible in a secure manner from corporate PCs, from BYOD, from within LAN , or from the Internet.
Solution
To find the right solution, the customer turned to Microsoft Gold Partner Lambert Consulting.
Lambert Consulting is a certified partner of KEMP Technologies and provides expertise in, among other things, Microsoft platforms.
Proof of concept
The customer already had a virtualized environment, so choosing between a hardware or virtual KEMP appliance was an easy decision. The KEMP virtual appliance can be deployed at no cost. There are two options for PoC: free or trial. It is a great, risk-free way to get familiar with the product. For production use, a licensed version must be purchased.
The main component of the KEMP solution is a web load balancer, it , which is typically used to load balance internal LAN traffic across multiple servers in a farm. For example, if you have 3 Exchange servers, KEMP can route user requests to the least-loaded Exchange server. If a server, KEMP will redirect user traffic to another node without any impact on the user's application experience.
Another component is a reverse- Proxy. It is typically used to securely publish internal applications to the Internet. KEMP handles user authentication, single sign-on, SSL offload, deep protocol inspection, DDoS protection, HTML rewriting, and other security-related functions. KEMP’s SSL re-encryption enables the secure publication of legacy applications, such as those that are not compatible with the modern TLS 1.2 protocol.
Optionally, we can also add a web application firewall, GEO DNS, and management console features.
Planning
The customer and Lambert Consulting began planning the deployment of KEMP load balancers, starting with a Microsoft UCC project and then gradually added more functionality and more applications at a later stage.
Deployment
A KEMP highly available cluster consisting of two virtual appliances was deployed on VMWare ESX cluster and has two network interfaces—one for the DMZ and one for the LAN subnets.
KEMP load-balances internal LAN connections to Skype for Business the farm and performs Secure Reverse Proxy for Skype for Business external users.
ServiceNow is a cloud service provided at client_instance.servicenow.com, but this customer wanted to maintain its brand and provide the service under its own domain name: Servicenow.domain.org
To do that, a KEMP virtual service was created that accepts requests for servicenow.domain.org, then rewrites and redirects the request to cloud. This way users we have a clean and consistent way to access any application, regardless of where it is located— cloud or on-premises.
Applications added later as KEMP Virtual services in the frame of individual customer project implementations:
- Exchange farm
- Intranet portal
- Microsoft Remote Desktop s Services Farm
- Single sign-on for open source CRM
- Multifactor authentication self-service portal
- Microsoft Office Web Apps
Benefits
- Provided Unified, Security-Enhanced Connectivity: Providea highly secure service for internal and external users.
- Supports application high availability by load balancing traffic across several server nodes.
- Affordable costs: a competing products like F5 BigIP or Citrix Netscaler are more expensive .
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