Included in Local Traffic Managers Universal Inspection Engine (UIE) is a set of functions that you can specify within BIG-IP system iRules to direct traffic in more granular ways. Using these iRule functions, you can write expressions that direct traffic based on content data, or direct traffic to a specific member of a pool. Universal  Full Article…

SSL persistence is a type of persistence that tracks SSL sessions using the SSL session ID, and it is a property of each individual pool. Using SSL persistence can be particularly important if your clients typically have translated IP addresses or dynamic IP addresses, such as those that Internet service providers typically assign. Even when  Full Article…

Source address affinity persistence, also known as simple persistence, tracks sessions based only on the source IP address. When a client requests a connection to a virtual server that supports source address affinity persistence, Local Traffic Manager checks to see if that client previously connected, and if so, returns the client to the same pool  Full Article…

Session Initiation Protocol is an application-layer protocol that manages sessions consisting of multiple participants, thus enabling real-time messaging, voice, data, and video. A session can be a simple two-way telephone call or Instant Message dialogue, or a complex, collaborative, multi-media conference call that includes voice, data, and video. With SIP, applications can communicate with one  Full Article…

Normally, Windows servers running Microsoft Terminal Services can use a session broker (known as Terminal Services Session Directory in Windows Server 2003 and TS Session Broker in Windows Server 2008) to ensure that user sessions are assigned to specific servers. If a client initiates a connection request to the wrong terminal server, that server redirects  Full Article…

Hash persistence allows you to create a persistence hash based on an existing iRule that uses the persist iRule command. Using hash persistence is the same as using universal persistence, except that with hash persistence, the resulting persistence key is a hash of the data, rather than the data itself. rule my_persist_irule { when HTTP_REQUEST  Full Article…

You can optimize your server array with destination address affinity persistence. Destination address affinity persistence, also known as sticky persistence, directs requests for a certain destination IP address to the same server, regardless of which client made the request. This type of persistence provides the most benefits when load balancing caching servers. A caching server  Full Article…

Cookie persistence uses an HTTP cookie stored on a clients computer to allow the client to reconnect to the same pool member previously visited at a web site. There are 3 methods of cookie persistence available: HTTP Cookie Insert method HTTP Cookie Rewrite method HTTP Cookie Passive method HTTP Cookie Insert method If you specify  Full Article…

Session is a virtual channel created between client and server via which these two communicates. One session can be made of many connections. And some application servers maintain a client state in its memory and thus are session sensitive. For example e-shops app. servers can stores shopping card info in its memory and if we  Full Article…

What are profiles? The BIG-IP® local traffic management system can manage application-specific network traffic in a variety of ways, depending on the protocols and services being used. For example, you can configure the BIG-IP system to compress HTTP response data, or you can configure the system to authenticate SSL client certificates before passing requests on  Full Article…

Most important stuff from the LAB are as follows: floating IP address is the shared IP between F5 cluster tried that setup utility but dont know if I gonna use it ever again backups are easy to handle Tmos seems to be very good. From root you can execute tmos commands via „tmsh list /net  Full Article…

TMOS Shell or TMSH is very nice CLI. It is easy to configure and navigate. Below you can find some basic info how to work with tmsh. Tmos works in modular fashion. You can check list of modules by command show /? Yes „?“ works like in Cisco. The „/“ is the root and modules  Full Article…

BIG-IP LTM offers a many load balancing methods to choose from: Static – these methods do no take into consideration the server performance Round robin Ratio Dynamic – take into consideration server performance Least connections Fastest Observed Predictive Dynamic ratio It is important to note that LB distributes the request on available servers only. Server  Full Article…

LTM is shiped with OS, you dont need to install it. It has also preconfigured IP address. However you need to active license. License reactivation must be done also after upgrades. LTM does not have pre configured default route. Initial setup consist of couple of steps depending what I need to setup. Basically it is:  Full Article…