Building a SharePoint 2019 MinRole Environment in Microsoft Azure - Add a Load Balancer for External Access

If you have been following along in this series the last post had us fully deploy SharePoint 2019 into our Azure environment. You may feel we are done, but in truth, there is still a little bit left. Right now the SharePoint environment is active and works great but only if you either remote into one of the servers directly or if you know the external IP address of the WFE. To correct this we need to add a load balancer for external access to the environment.

This is a multi-part series. You can see what is coming and review other posts in the series by clicking one of the following links:

Microsoft Azure – Add a Load Balancer for External Access

The steps are fairly straight forward, but basically, all we are going to do is create an endpoint in our environment that will post requests for the SharePoint site from outside the Azure network at our SharePoint WFE.

To do this login to your Azure Portal.

Click on Create a resource.
Select the category Networking.
Click on Load Balancer

Next fill in the information as required:
- Resource Group: resource group where your SharePoint Environment exists
- Name: Give the balancer a meaningful name (no spaces)
- Region: Select the region you wish it to run in.
- Type: We want this to be public so it is external to the environment
- SKU: Basic, unless you are going to have a lot of traffic, than standard
- Public IP Address: Create new
- Public IP Address Name: As before giving it a meaningful name
- Assignment: Static (we don’t want this changing for an endpoint)
- Add a public IPv6 Address: No
Click Review + Create
Click Create

Create Backend Pool

Once the load balancer is created we need to point it at the WFE as it is just sitting there. It is open to the public now but has nothing to point your requests at.

Access the load balancer
Click on Backend pools.
Click on + Add.

Update the settings of the pool
- Name: Meaningful name
- IP Version: IPv4
- Associated To: Single virtual machine (if you have multiple WFE, select Availability Set and select all the WFEs).
- Target virtual machine: Your SharePoint WFE
- Click on +Add a target network IP Configuration
- Network IP configuration: NIC for the WFE you wish to handle external requests
Click Ok.

Health Probe

Even if you are only pointing at a single server you still need to create a health probe. The purpose of the health probe is to ensure the endpoint the load balancer is pointing at is functioning properly.

Click on Health probes
Click +Add
Fill in the settings as required
- Name: Meaningful name
- Protocol: HTTP
- Port: 80
- Path: /
- Interval: 5
- Unhealthy Threshold:2

Load Balancing Rules

Almost done. Now that we have the front-end and the back-end of the load balancer configured we have to tell the load balancer what to do with requests. We do this with “Load Balancing Rules”.

Click on Load balancing rules
Click on +Add.

Configure the settings accordingly:
- Name: Meaningful name
- IP Version: IPv4
- Frontend IP address: If not selected already, select the new IP address for the front end
- Protocol: TCP
- Port: 80
- Backend port: 80
- Backend pool: If not selected already, select the new backend pool
- Health probe: If not selected already, select the new health probe
- Session persistence: None
- Idle timeout (minutes): 4
- Floating IP (direct server return): disabled

Once you have enabled the rule you should test to make sure it is working. You can do this with either a registered domain or an easier method would be to update your HOSTS file to point your URL at the public IP address and attempt to access the site.

If your Azure network is configured properly you should be able to hit the SharePoint site.

Thanks for reading!

Building a SharePoint 2019 MinRole Environment in Microsoft Azure – Add a Load Balancer for External Access