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How to integrate f5 Load balancer with Jira

Nelson Jimenez Manio

I'm trying to utilize an F5 load balancer with a wildcard SSL certificate. Keep in mind I am not load balancing JIRA. It will be a single server behind a single VIP. I'm just trying to avoid installing an SSL cert directly on the server. if this is the configuration in my server.xml :

<Connector port="8080"
maxThreads="150"
minSpareThreads="25"
maxSpareThreads="75"
connectionTimeout="20000"

enableLookups="false"
maxHttpHeaderSize="8192"
protocol="HTTP/1.1"
useBodyEncodingForURI="true"
redirectPort="8443"
acceptCount="100"
disableUploadTimeout="true"
scheme="https"
proxyName="jirapd.sports.com"
proxyPort="443"

What will be my new config be ? What needs to be change in F5 load balancer ?

Accepted answers

Dan Dan10

You need to make a few changes if you want to put it behind an F5 for SSL offload:

First - turn off/shutdown Jira
Go into your installation directory and open the conf directory. Default would be C:\Program Files\Atlassian\JIRA\conf
Make a copy of the server.xml file to BACKUP-server.xml
Edit the connector and add these three lines (I am assuming you have NOT made any adjustments here outside of the normal Jira Wizard installation): secure="true" proxyPort="443" scheme="https"
On the F5 request a certificate and ensure the name is consistent with the domain name that you use, or is a SAN cert... whatever makes sense in your installation. For example jira.testdomain.com
Sign the certificate with your installed CA and ensure that the chain or CA certificate is installed in the client browsers.
Import the signed certificate and verify that you have a certificate/key pair.
Create an F5 SSL client profile, inherit from the default client SSL profile and override the certificate and key settings. Add the certificate and key from the above two steps.
Apply this certificate to your VIP - ensure the rest of you settings are sane (The VIP is on 443, you have the appropriate profiles). Do not include a Server SSL profile (unless you are encrypting back to the Jira web server.. and in that case this is probably not the solution you are looking for).
Start the Jira server - give it time to boot and initialize.
Connect to Jira via your VIP, you can also create a 80->443 redirect VIP to handle redirection on the F5. (Just create a vip on port 80 with the same IP address and ONLY add the default iRule _sys_https_redirect)
Go into the settings or Jira and change the base url to https://<yourconfigured FQDN>

Hope that helps...

All comments

LucasA_ag1oiy

Proceed configuring you F5 (Viprion/Big IP) as reverse proxy (http://www.f5.com/glossary/reverse-proxy/). I belive that you have to disable SSL on VIP, enabling only the external network to handle SSL requests.

Nelson Jimenez Manio

I want to offload SSL to F5 (BigIP). Client will be connecting via BigIP using HTTPS. BigIP will forward request to Jira using HTTP. Certificates are stored in F5 (BigIP).

Sam Ferrise

I have the same scenario...when the F5 is in the picture it causes the dashboard and other things to not load due to an invalid scheme. When it's not, everything is fine.

Did you ever solve this?

Srinivas Patrun

hi Lucas,

We have enabled F5 proxy for JIRA and we see no issues in accesing but confluence gadgets not loading getting marshal exceptions. Could you please help?

Thanks,Srinivas

Dan Dan10

You need to make a few changes if you want to put it behind an F5 for SSL offload:

First - turn off/shutdown Jira
Go into your installation directory and open the conf directory. Default would be C:\Program Files\Atlassian\JIRA\conf
Make a copy of the server.xml file to BACKUP-server.xml
Edit the connector and add these three lines (I am assuming you have NOT made any adjustments here outside of the normal Jira Wizard installation): secure="true" proxyPort="443" scheme="https"
On the F5 request a certificate and ensure the name is consistent with the domain name that you use, or is a SAN cert... whatever makes sense in your installation. For example jira.testdomain.com
Sign the certificate with your installed CA and ensure that the chain or CA certificate is installed in the client browsers.
Import the signed certificate and verify that you have a certificate/key pair.
Create an F5 SSL client profile, inherit from the default client SSL profile and override the certificate and key settings. Add the certificate and key from the above two steps.
Apply this certificate to your VIP - ensure the rest of you settings are sane (The VIP is on 443, you have the appropriate profiles). Do not include a Server SSL profile (unless you are encrypting back to the Jira web server.. and in that case this is probably not the solution you are looking for).
Start the Jira server - give it time to boot and initialize.
Connect to Jira via your VIP, you can also create a 80->443 redirect VIP to handle redirection on the F5. (Just create a vip on port 80 with the same IP address and ONLY add the default iRule _sys_https_redirect)
Go into the settings or Jira and change the base url to https://<yourconfigured FQDN>

Hope that helps...

Scott Geertgens

This works great. You can go a step further and have tomcat behind apache, and still have SSL offloaded to the F5. The only additional change in this scenario is to add proxyName="<apache server>" to the Connector block above as per Dan.

Bimal Patel

Scott, did you get the Applinks to work between Confluence & JIRA after making the above changes ? Bimal.

Scott Geertgens

We don't currently have any applinks established, so I'm unaware of any conflicts in setting it up in that scenario.