An Azure Traffic Manager is a Network Service
that can be used to distribute incoming traffic between two
"endpoints" within the Azure cloud. This is done to increase
performance, improve availability or load balance Azure Websites. It can also
be used by Azure VM's....
In the context of Azure Websites (or endpoints)
the website instances should be provisioned in two separate regions or
locations. If you are trying to load balance between two Azure websites running
in the same region you will be stopped when you add the endpoints to the
Traffic Manager.
Azure Website instances are only supported if
they are on the Standard Web Hosting Plan Mode. This can be done using the
Scale tab from the Website pane in the Management Portal.
The first step is to create a Traffic Manager,
click on the New button. Then click Network Services, then Traffic Manager,
then Quick Create. From here you must give your Traffic Manager a globally
unique name and choose a Load Balancing Method. I have chosen Round Robin in
this example, the other options are Performance and Failover. Click Create.
Scroll down from the list of Azure services and
click on Traffic Manager, you will be presented by the following screen that
lets you add endpoints to the Traffic Manager. Click Add Endpoints.
Choose Website from the Service Type, and tick
the option to enable the Service Endpoints for the Azure Website instances. You
will notice the warning that states you cannot have two website endpoints from
the same region configured within the same Traffic Manager.
By default a Traffic Manager is created with your
unique name with the FQDN of trafficmanager.net so for example mine in this
example is rbetts-lm.trafficmanager.net.
To have your clients connect to a DNS name from
your own domain you can recreate a CNAME record to point to the Traffic
Manager, for example;
CNAME weblb > rbetts-lm.trafficmanager.net.
