posted on Thursday, May 13, 2010 1:48 PM
In conjunction with the release of Microsoft SharePoint 2010, the F5 Management Pack team has released v2.1.0.43 of our Management Pack. Along side this release we are introducing the F5 Application Designer for SharePoint 2010. This new application designer is actually very similar to the SharePoint 2007 Application Designer released last month, but with the SharePoint 2010 Management Pack helping run the show, a whole new level of visibility and capabilities have become available to the user surrounding a SharePoint deployment.
The Application Designer for SharePoint 2010 has a lot of the same objects and features as the SharePoint 2007 designer, but with the new capabilities of the SharePoint Foundation 2010 Management Pack, we are really able to get the application specific objects we require to make the most sense out of the whole picture. On the right is a sample diagram of a single SharePoint Server farm with the basic elements of the designer discovered: F5 LTM Virtual Server, F5 LTM Pool Member, SharePoint Server, Operating System, Website, SharePoint Web Application, and the SQL Content Database for the Website and SharePoint Web Application in the diagram. There is also an object for Hyper-V Virtual Machine if the server discovered is running under Hyper-V and you have the Virtual Machine Manager Management Pack installed.
If you have your SharePoint 2010 deployment up and running and are ready to dive into the wonderful world of F5 Application Designers, then you may find the following fairly useful. First we have the Wiki documentation for all of our App Designers, but if you scroll down, you will find the SharePoint 2010 specific deployment guide. Along with the documentation, I have made up a somewhat lengthy tutorial video to help show you how to get things working, as well as walk you through downloading, installing, and modifying the scripts necessary to successfully run our SharePoint designer. That video can be located here:
Working with the F5 Application Designer for SharePoint 2010
If you have any additional questions or concerns, feel free to visit our F5 Management Pack Group and post in our forums.