F5 has been working with Microsoft over the last few months on building a solution for using BIG-IP LTM to scale the newly RTM’d Forefront Unified Access Gateway. For those of you who don’t know, UAG is the next evolution in Microsoft’s Internet Access Gateway (IAG) solution, incorporating several well-known and new access methods into one package.
There are a few unique features within UAG which makes the technology compelling. Starting off with it’s broad support of access protocols (SSL, IPSec, Teredo, IPv4, IPv6, etc…) as well as its enhanced management functionality. By building in support for Active Directory and Direct Access, UAG allows security administrators to have granular control over the users and resources.
F5 has developed a great solution for providing scalability, high availability, and performance to UAG. By leveraging the BIG-IP LTM’s application layer health monitoring, advanced load balancing, and intelligent iRules engine, we’ve built a solution that allows UAG to scale to meet the needs and uptime requirements of the enterprise and provider markets.
As a start, F5 has created a landing page for the UAG solution. On that page, you will find a link to our updated BIG-IP LTM Deployment Guide for UAG. We’re continuing our testing with Microsoft, and plan to expand the scope of the current solution to cover more access protocols as well as using BIG-IP GTM to provide global access.
Later this week I’ll blog on some of the technical details regarding the solution. Leveraging iRules to do some of the connection tracking is something that I have a feeling most of the DevCentral community will be very interested in reading about.
