NimbostratusDynamic Ratio balancing with external ratios set by iControl
Hi All,
I have a situation where I need to frequently adjust the amount of traffic going to particular members of a balancing pool based on a calculation performed on an external system.
Initially I created a pool with the "Ratio (member)" balancing method and using iControl to adjust the "ratio" value for the members pereodically. This seemed to work but the amount of traffic going to each pool member would not consistently follow the ratios I was setting and seemed to end up getting all the traffic stuck on one or two of the pool members after a while. I figured that perhaps the ratio value was not designed for frequent changes and so perhaps was not updated into the LTM very often.
I then switched the pool balancing method to "Dynamic Ratio (member)" and adjusted the "dynamic_ratio" value of each member via iControl periodically. This worked much better and the hits to the servers very closely tracked the changing ratios as they were being adjusted by my script.
I am leery of this solution, however, because all mentions of Dynamic Ratio balancing talk about the ratios being adjusted by special pool monitors and no mention of doing it via iControl instead. The pool monitor in use on the pool is a standard HTTP monitor and is not one of the special monitors. I assume the HTTP monitor does not tinker with the members' dynamic_ratio values.
So my question is - is this a valid way to use Dynamic Ratio balancing? i.e: using the Dynamic Ratio (member) balancing method and using iControl to adjust the dynamic_ratio values instead of using one of the special pool monitors. Is there any downside or potential issue with doing this the way I have it set up? Is it possible something will reset my dynamic_ratio values even though the monitor is a "normal" one? Is there a more preferred method of doing this kind of dynamically-changing server weight?
I'm running BIG-IP 10.2.3 Build 112.0
Thanks for any feedback you have.
Cheers, Simon.
