BIG-IP

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.