Our extended Microsoft Partner Team spent last week in Las Vegas for the Microsoft Management Summit. While a few members of our team attended the sessions & trainings, the rest of us manned the F5 booth. We had a phenomenal turnout, and it was great to meet those of you who stopped by!

There were several highlights from the show. We brought several members from our ControlPoint team, who gave the first public demos of the upcoming product. For those of you who aren't aware of ControlPoint yet, it is our yet-to-be-released F5 monitoring solution that is built upon System Center Operations Manager 2007. The feedback from the demo was extremely positive, with most people ecstatic about the OpsMan platform that we have chosen to go with. 

We also introduced our Microsoft centered Virtualization Strategy, which focuses on dynamically provisioning services in the network. We have been working with our friends at HP to build a demo of the solution, and they actually brought a working prototype to MMS to showcase. I really want to discuss our Virtualization strategy in depth, so I'll devote a full post to it in the near future.

Last, but not least, our own Alan Murphy delivered a great presentation on Virtualized Data Centers, which was very well received by those who attended. Like always, Alan hit one out of the park.

Overall, it was a great show for F5.  Plus, I came back from Vegas with all my money this time! ;)

For now,
Ryan

What does a business do when they need 2 incompatible systems, such as a purchase order system from vendor X & an invoicing system from vendor Y, to communicate and share information?

One popular option is to implement a business process management (aka, information broker) system like BizTalk from Microsoft. In a very simplistic description, it is designed to take information from one system, manipulate it as necessary, and send it to the requesting system (and vice versa). It's a popular method for enabling data from legacy mainframes to be presented on more modern web based platforms such as SharePoint.

We are currently engaged with the Microsoft BizTalk team in Redmond to develop guidance on "load balancing Biztalk", and should hopefully have some collateral in the form of deployment guides soon. But in the meantime, I wanted to post a link to a great whitepaper our friends at HP released on scaling BizTalk. You'll notice that HP used a BIG-IP as the load balancer to do their performance testing for this paper

http://h20219.www2.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA0-9561ENW.pdf

If you get a chance, give the pdf a read. It is a good primer on how BIG-IP can load balance receiver adaptors. We're also working on guidance for XML message security & more that should make for a very compelling solution. Check back soon for more!

We’ve been working with the Microsoft Dynamics team for over a year now building and testing a scalable architecture for their CRM package. And now with the release of CRM 4.0, BIG-IP plays a critical role in providing high availability, scalability, and performance for an enterprise deployment.

If you’re interested in deploying BIG-IP with Dynamics CRM, please take a look at the deployment guide here -> Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Deployment Guide

Just to let you know, we’ve also slated a round of testing for WebAccelerator with Dynamics CRM to happen later this year. We should be able to get some pretty compelling acceleration results from that. I’ll keep you posted on how the progress of that!

For now,
Ryan

I’m not sure how many of you have considered Office Communications Server 2007 (OCS) yet, however the new functionality such as VOIP, Web Conferencing, and Application Sharing are starting to attract some real visibility within the Unified Communications space. In fact, Gartner places Microsoft squarely in the leader’s quadrant for their UC 2007 Magic Quadrant.

http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/nortel/150273.html

Providing high availability and scalability for an OCS deployment is becoming more and more critical to the enterprises are looking to adopt OCS as part of their communications strategy. Interestingly enough, Microsoft has gone as far as requiring the use of a “hardware load balancer” for enterprise deployments. NLB is not supported in lab or production deployments with OCS.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/939800

We’ve been working and testing with the OCS product team since the early alpha release days to make sure that we could provide a compatible solution for load balancing OCS. The good news is that we have a rock solid solution, tested by both F5 and Microsoft, and documented here

http://www.f5.com/pdf/deployment-guides/microsoft-ocs-ltm94-dg.pdf

We put over 6 months of testing, documenting, and collaboration with Microsoft in putting this deployment guide together. If you’re looking for architectural strategies, best practices, or even just configuration instructions, take a look, they’re in there.

I’d also like to elicit any feedback on deploying BIG-IP & OCS. My team tends to receive quite a bit of field related experiences on the subject, and our plan is to include this type of feedback in the form of best practice updates to these guides.

A few months back we participated in a round of "best practices" testing surrounding accelerating SharePoint with HP. The results were extremely impressive, and are documented in this whitepaper.

http://h71019.www7.hp.com/ActiveAnswers/library/GetPage.aspx?pageid=570023&statusid=0&audienceid=0&ccid=0&langid=121

The original purpose of this testing was to truly determine if the SharePoint acceleration technologies, specifically the one developed by F5, improved performance enough to be built into HP's suggested architectures. Needless to say, the testing went very well and the results speak for themselves. Take a look!

I happened to be one of the two F5 engineers that were dedicated to this project, and I have to mention that I was very impressed with HP's testing methodologies and practices. Jimi(HP) and his team understand the importance and value of an engagement like this, and put a tremendous amount of effort into making sure the testing was comprehensive, fair, accurate, and conclusive. The overall project took well over 2 months and involved hundreds of different test passes. I tip my hat to all that were involved on their side.

I will hopefully find the time to post some more technical information on the testing & results, however in the meantime I just wanted to write this quick post to announce that the whitepaper is now public!

After having this blog account set up for almost a year, I've actually published my first post!

I've been with F5 nearly 8 years now, working as an engineer in several groups that have spanned Services, Sales, and Marketing. Almost 2 years ago I joined our Microsoft Alliance team as the first dedicated engineer, focusing on bringing some of our joint solutions out of the lab and into production environments.

Within those 2 years I've seen tremendous growth within our Microsoft Partnership. Along with being invited into the Microsoft Global ISV program (which less than 200 partners are members of), we've built new relationships with several groups within MSFT, including Unified Communications, Longhorn, Dynamics, MobileM3, Terminal Services, Commerce Server and more.

Unfortunately, one of our team members, and a fellow engineer, JamesH, has decided to take a new role within F5. James was an incredible contributor to our team, but found a CorpDev position in which he truly will add a huge amount of value to F5. Congrats James, and I wish you the best of luck.

I plan on using this blog as a means to communicate some of the work we're doing with MSFT. We're working on some fantastic new joint solutions, and this will make for a great way to update our customers on the progress we’re making. I hope you enjoy reading it, and feel free to post any feedback.