Big-IP F5 LTM Load Balancer Documentation Script with Powershell

Here is a script I whipped up to perform a report on your Big-IP LTM load balancers using powershell. The report currently includes the virtual servers, pools, and various bits of status information on both. Big-IP iControl modules are needed (for obvious reasons).

BIG-IP: Quick Tip

2011-03-01 1 min read BIG-IP Networking System Administration Zachary Loeber

They silently (well maybe not so silent as I didn’t check if it was announced) published an internal tool that the F5 support engineers use for troubleshooting Big-ip load balancer configuration dumps. With a login account you can access this tool at the aptly named URL of http://ihealth.f5.com. This has some really cool info that you might fine useful in resolving load balancer issues in your environment.

Big-IP: Custom IIS SOAP Monitor

2011-01-22 2 min read BIG-IP IIS Linux Microsoft Networking System Administration Zachary Loeber

In working on a production issue with my company’s flagship SaaS product I worked with some of the brilliant F5 engineers to isolate one web server in the load balanced pool which was intermittently failing. The F5 engineer recommended a health monitor that does more than just poll for a static page. He suggested we implement some kind of soap call to make the application pool do some work and return a result (I guess in case the IIS application pool is misbehaving but not down). So I worked with one of our developers to do just that but ran into some caveats which required yet another custom health monitor.

Big-IP: Sharepoint 2010 Monitor

2011-01-21 1 min read Active Directory BIG-IP Linux Microsoft Networking Sharepoint System Administration Zachary Loeber

While specing out a Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 migration I discovered that the default monitor created by the application template on our big-ip LTM load balancers does not work. In seeking a solution I ran across this gentleman’s blog with a custom external monitor but found that it didn’t really work. The solution to make it work was simple (as I explained on his blog in a comment). I went ahead and extended it to be more environment generic.

BIG-IP: Load Balancer Upgrade

2009-12-07 2 min read BIG-IP Linux Networking System Administration Zachary Loeber

I had the pleasure of doing an F5 BIG-IP load balancer upgrade recently and am happy with the way the F5 people have designed their systems for fail over. Essentially you will use different system partitions to host different versions of their product and you change which one you want to boot to after updating the inactive partition. This, theoretically, means you can always go back to a working configuration if something goes awry. I’m unhappy with how fragmented their documentation is in getting from point A to point B though. Here is a quick rundown of what I had to do…