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Robert_Groos_34's avatar
Robert_Groos_34
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Mar 12, 2014

F5 Health Monitor, Remote Server Maintenance

Hi,

 

We are looking to implement a Health monitor that could run on one of our management servers that would control if servers in our architecture are up or down. Basically a way to manually fail over nodes/pools for maintenance. In operations we do not control our f5 configurations so additional support is needed externally.

 

In short: How do you configure/implement a health monitor that can be run on another servers so if you take that proxy down it would fail-over applications to redirect traffic away from the servers that need maintenance?

 

Any direction or lessons learned would be greatly appreciated.

 

APM
application delivery
availability
design
management
performance
security

2 Replies

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  • nathe's avatar
    nathe
    Icon for Cirrocumulus rankCirrocumulus
    Mar 12, 2014

    Robert,

     

    I think you could setup a custom monitor and specify an Alias Address of the management server. If you apply this monitor to the pool in question then it will health check the mgmt server and not the pool members themselves. This way if this goes down the pool members are reported as down.

     

    Suspect you'd want a specific pool member health monitor too, to ensure pool members themselves are up.

     

    Hope this helps,

     

    N

     

  • Christopher_Boo's avatar
    Christopher_Boo
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Mar 12, 2014

    Is this a web app? If so, take a look at the "receive disable string" option of your current health monitor. If you have access to manipulate the health monitor response from the pool members, I think it would be cleaner and not rely on a separate management server. If you use a separate management server and that server has an unexpected outage, not good, especially when you don't have admin access the the F5 environment.

     

    Chris