Active / Standby server pools

Have you looked at priority group activation? You could disable the pool members through a disable string in a health monitor and leave only the standby boxes available, which would trigger the activation of the secondary priority group. Once the primary servers came back online, the standby boxes would automatically fall out of the pool.

IMO, this feature would greatly simplify the process over a custom API call.

I agree with that, it's how I would prefer to configure it and it would be ideal. However the app developers see it as too much of a risk to accidentally auto-changeover which they can't cope with apparently. It's a bit like Dr Frankenstein and a big electric switch to switch the lightning to its destination.

Hi Nic!

Have you considered using iControl? Then you could script the activation/deactivation of the pool members with ie. powershell.

/Patrik

Yes, that's what I was thinking would really be the only option, but I have zero experience of iControl. Looking through the iControl pages I have found a script that adds the default_pool to a vServer. Can you "pile" these commands on top of each other, and can anyone advise how you can store and run the scripts from a simple command?

Example of command;

https://devcentral.f5.com/wiki/iControl.LocalLB__VirtualServer__set_default_pool_name.ashx

Do you have any experience with powershell or scripting? If you write the script in meta code I might be able to write one for you tomorrow. :)

/Patrik

No experience at all I'm afraid, just playing with the above page i used the list of vServers and pools as follows;

set_default_pool_name( in String vs-22-receivers-mediation virtual_servers, in String po-receivers-mediation-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-receivers-opengate-FTP virtual_servers, in String po-receivers-opengate-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-receivers-dsp virtual_servers, in String po-receivers-dsp-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-receivers-opengate-SNMP virtual_servers, in String po-receivers-opengate-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-opengate-cmdb virtual_servers, in String po-opengate-cmdb-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-opengate-ch virtual_servers, in String po-opengate-ch-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-opengate-ggsn virtual_servers, in String po-opengate-ggsn-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-opengate-dsp virtual_servers, in String po-opengate-dsp-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-opengate-remedy virtual_servers, in String po-opengate-remedy-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-opengatefw-ch virtual_servers, in String po-opengate-ch-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-opengate-nvision virtual_servers, in String po-opengate-nvision-csn2 default_pools, in String vs-22-opengate-mesh virtual_servers, in String po-opengate-mesh-csn2 default_pools );

of course I could be completely wrong!

and then i realised the page removed my line feeds but you get the idea

Hehe, actually I am not sure. A guess would be that you want to set the default pool for a couple of virtual servers?

Do you have any scripting experience with any other language? If so, it'd be a breeze to learn some PS and iControl if you get an example. :)

/Patrik

I probably just need walking through it by someone who really knows.

Basically inserting a default_pool in each vServer with the script. Does it replace the previous default pool automatically?

I must find somewhere to learn this scripting :-/

Hi Nic

Scripting is nice to know for sure. :) But if you don't know the basics of scripting perhaps a more manual approach would be preferred?

Have you considered logging into the load balancers and change what you need with tmsh? You can have a list of commands ready and just paste them.

/Patrik