Configure Oracle Beehive with Barracuda Loadbalancer

Oracle / F5 provides instructions for configuring Beehive with BIG-IP, however for other loadbalancers the information is very limited. As we use Barracuda loadbalancer at our site, we had to set this up. In case someone else is using this setup, this might help a bit.

I will assume that you have your Barracuda loadbalancer up & running, so I will not go into details about that. Also, as we do SSL offloading in the loadbalancer these instructions assumes that you have your certificate uploaded to the loadbalancer. To do SSL offloading in the loadbalancer was recommended to us by Oracle as doing this on the Beehive servers will consume a significant amount of resources.

The actual setup of Beehive in Barracuda is then quite straightforward, start by creating separate service for each of the Beehive services. That means one service each for HTTP, IMAP, SMTP, XMPP and BTP.

Note that you cannot do SSL offloading in the loadbalancer for the XMPP service. For this service you will have to terminate the SSL in your Beehive node, using the instructions provided in the Beehive documentation for XMPP. We had a SR running with Oracle Support for a while until they could confirm that it wasn't possible. In the end we decided not to use the Barracuda for XMPP, instead we routed the traffic directly to one of our Beehive nodes.

The Barracuda services should then be configured as follows:

• HTTP as a 'Layer 7 - HTTP' service
• IMAP as a 'TCP Proxy' service
• SMTP as a 'TCP Proxy' service
• BTP as a 'TCP Proxy' service

In each of the services you will need to enable SSL Offloading as this options default to 'No'. Apart from that, you could basically use the default options from the Barracuda. For the HTTP service you probably also want to consider the 'Send traffic to Last Resort Server' that will direct any HTTP request to a web server that will display some information in case Beehive for some reason becomes unavailable.

To summarize, the setup of Oracle Beehive with Barracuda loadbalancer is a quite simple & straightforward, we did not encounter any particular issues during the setup, with the exception of the XMPP issue.