posted on Monday, August 16, 2010 2:56 PM
With the release of the F5 Management Pack v2.1.2 (available for download here) the F5 Application Designer extensibility framework has been updated to support various load-balancing scenarios, based on health and performance monitoring conditions of the applications monitored to System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).
1. The F5 Application Designer Extensions: a Quick Overview
The F5 Application Designer Extensions are application specific management packs built on top of the core F5 Management Pack. They provide holistic monitoring and auto-configuration support for various server platforms and application environments fronted by F5 devices (such as IIS 7, SharePoint 2007/2010, VMM Server 2008/R2). The traditional way of monitoring all these applications in System Center Operations Manager usually would be mostly scoped to the individual platform itself rather than a unified health monitoring view of the whole application environment.
Here’s where the F5 Application Designers come into play and wire the applications together into a unified health monitoring diagram, as “Application Instances”, enabling a more comprehensive view of the applications’ health in System Center Operations Manager.
With the F5 Application Designer extensions, the F5 LTM Pool Members are paired with their related application components (such as Windows servers, Web servers, Virtual servers, SharePoint servers, etc) and the resulting object hierarchies are wired together as “Application Instances” grouped within an “Application Instance Group”, which ultimately is paired with the related F5 LTM Virtual Server, making up the “Overall Application” monitoring object. Such an application can be for example the entire deployment of an e-commerce web-farm, monitored within System Center Operations Manager.
The health of the App Instance by default represents the worst health of any of it's member components. In turn, the overall Application's health depends on at least one of the App Instances being healthy as well as the health of the underlying LTM Virtual Server.
More information on F5 Application Designer Extensions related topics can be found here:
2. Performance / System Metrics / Provisioning Based Load Balancing - Overview
In this article (which is part of a series on similar topics), I'll talk about the F5 Application Designer Extensions and their use in providing intelligent monitoring decisions within the System Center Operations Manager, in various data-center-specific scenarios. In particular: the health-based load balancing, where F5 LTM Pool Members get enabled/disabled depending on the health of various applications monitored.
Description: Update LTM Pool Member load-balancing ratios based on system-performance / provisioning
Use Case:
- Set the load-balancing method for the targeted LTM Pool to “Ratio (member)”
- Start by setting the Ratio on both LTM Pool Members to 1
- Provision LTM Pool Member 1 (virtual machine) with 2GB of RAM
- Provision LTM Pool Member 2 (virtual machine) with 4GB of RAM
- See how the load balancing ratios on LTM Pool Member 1 and LTM Pool Member 2 get updated (automatically) to 33 and 67 respectively, following the capacity (total memory) of the LTM Pool Members
3. Prerequisites
4. Preparation
- Discover F5 device (with at least 1 LTM Virtual Server and 2 LTM Pool Members)
- Discover IIS 7 web servers (expected to run on the LTM Pool Members discovered above)
- Discover overall application deployment (F5 + IIS 7) (see details here):
- Look for the topic on “discovering an existing application” (here)
5. Scenario
- Set the load-balancing method for the targeted LTM Pool to “Ratio (member)”
- Start by setting the Ratio on both LTM Pool Members to 1
- Provision LTM Pool Member 1 (virtual machine) with 2GB of RAM
- Provision LTM Pool Member 2 (virtual machine) with 4GB of RAM
- See how the load balancing ratios on LTM Pool Member 1 and LTM Pool Member 2 get updated (automatically) to 33 and 67 respectively, following the capacity (total memory) of the LTM Pool Members
6. Resources
