One of the challenges with deploying advanced application delivery controllers as a way to improve the security, performance, and scalability of specific applications is the wealth of user-configurable options available. It can take network and application server administrators days if not weeks to optimize a configuration for their specific environment using all the knobs and buttons available.

A full-proxy based application delivery solution has a variety of specific configuration options that can be “tweaked” to gain optimal performance for application environments like IBM WebSphere. For example, it is possible to configure the client side (WAN) and the server side (LAN) with different profiles to address the specific quirks of each type of network link that can inhibit and degrade application performance. The same is true for TCP and HTTP connections; both client and server-side can be configured separately to increase performance and efficiency of application deployments.

But with so many options it is often the case that it can days or weeks to find all the possible configuration options – and test them – in order to arrive at the optimal configuration. Without arriving at an optimal configuration, however, you aren’t getting the most value out of your application delivery investment.

F5’s Application Ready Solutions drastically reduce the time required to optimize an application delivery environment by starting administrators with a “best practices” configuration. Essentially this is either a step-by-step deployment guide or a template comprising best practices for the specific application server environment that have been derived from extensive testing with the product and application server vendor. These templates drastically reduce the time to deploy and optimize application environments by providing a baseline atop which additional optimizations can be applied if desired.

IBM WebSphere 7 is the newest member of F5’s Application Ready Solutions offerings. The deployment guide, available here [PDF], provides detailed configuration and architectural guidance on deploying F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (for scalability), WebAccelerator (optimization and application acceleration), and FirePass (secure remote access to applications) for IBM WebSphere 7.

The deployment guide offers step-by-step details on configuring everything required for a fast, secure, optimized IBM WebSphere 7 deployment including:

• Connecting to the BIG-IP device
• Optional: Importing keys and certificates
• Creating the HTTP health monitor
• Creating the IBM HTTP server pool
• Creating profiles
• Creating the Redirect iRule
• Creating the virtual servers

This step-by-step list alone ought to cut hours off the configuration, as many people configuring F5 BIG-IP for the first time might begin by creating a virtual server and then move on to configuring the individual components necessary. But in reality it is more efficient to create and configure the individual components (profiles, monitors, rules, etc…) before creating the final “virtual server” required to provide connectivity to WebSphere for clients.