Forum Discussion

Kandel's avatar
Kandel
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Sep 28, 2019

BIG-IP

Hello,

 

I am new to F5.

 

I am using RSA Archer and want to use the Load Balancer. The Archer application is using Web Server for the user to login to the application. Due to load on the Web Servers you can use the Load Balancer to distribute the Load to the Web Servers.

 

I have done some researches and I think I need to use the BIG-IP and I want to configure the BIG-IP with 4 Web Servers.

 

I am seeking some advises on how to configure it and some docs. Best Practices and from where to start. If you please share your experience.

 

I noticed the Standard trail is 30 days and I was wonder to see if there is another license say for 2 - 3 months so I can use it.

 

Thank you in Advanced.

 

Regards

Kandel

BIG-IP
security
  • John_Meggers's avatar
    John_Meggers
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Sep 28, 2019

    I can't address the licensing issue you ask about.

     

    Big-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) isn't terribly difficult to learn. There is quite a bit of online training available from F5, see https://f5.com/education/training/free-courses. There's a "Getting Started with LTM" course you'll probably want to start with.

     

    Basically, you're going to configure a pool of the web servers you want to distribute traffic to, and you'll configure a "virtual server" which is the one IP address a client will point to in order to reach any of the four servers in the pool. The LTM will take care of receiving the traffic arriving at the virtual server, and distributing it to one of the pool members, based on how you configure the distribution (round robin, least connections, etc.) The virtual server is typically only listening on whatever protocols would be used to talk to the servers in the pool, and I don't know RSA Archer, so I can't tell you what those are. (I say "typically" because the F5 is like a firewall in that it's a default deny box, but it is possible to configure it in such a way that it's essentially side open. This is definitely not a best practice, though.) The most common ones are HTTP and HTTPS, but there may be others, and that will be part of what you'll have to figure out for your situation. You can configure "persistence" meaning once a client is talking to a particular pool member, when they come back, they will be sent to the same pool member. That may or may not be important to what you're doing, I don't know.

     

    As far as "best practices" go, I'm not sure there's a specific document that summarizes all that, but if you go through the training, I suspect you'll get some information there. And if you Google, you'll probably find some info that way.

     

    Hope this helps.