Forum Discussion
Kenny_Cheng_502
Nimbostratus
Nimbostratusbig question on BIP-IP/IIS 6 web loadbalancing
Hi,
I'm evaluating the web loadbalancing product. One is F5 Bip-IP solution. I'm glad I can find this place.
I've been talking to the local sales/pre-sales technical guys. No one seems to give me a simple answer.
I have a big question -
We would like to have the web load-balancing for 2 IIS6 web server with a MS SQL 2005 database server at the back-end. For coming, we may have middle-tier running web services.
My question is whether there is any PUBLISHED whitepaper or solution guide (similar to MSDN/SQL documentation) to set up BIP-IP with IIS6 with the consideration for the application stack - IIS, ASP.NET, web service, SQL. The monitor may need to handle the Active directory authentication or WS-Security before it can check the service status page.
Any recommended template for setting up the ASP.NET monitoring - this is for quick start. How to setup the monitor frequency - the pre-sales guy told me to have 5 sec interval -- I don't think this is any sensable answer.
I would like to have someone higher up in F5-technical core team to give me a quick and simple answer. Just consider we have the simple apps and 2-server configuration. If so, I can finalize and propose to my boss for approval. I trust F5 can handle my requirement easily but just no one is answering my question.
I will apprepricate anyone to give me a call/email directly.
My phone is 852-22898056 (HK) or kenny.tm.cheng@gmail.com
Many thanks.
Kenny
4 Replies
- Hi Kenny,
We do have a deployment guide that is foucsed on IIS. It can be found at:
http://www.f5.com/solutions/deployment/iis_bigip9_dg.html
Have you had a chance to take a look at this?
- James 
Kenny_Cheng_502Hi, James.
Thanks. This is the first time I received this file. The doc we received are much on the sales type.
This doc is already a good start to setup the IIS with basic HTTP 80 monitoring.
Because I'm a developer. What we want to achieve is to have better setup for ASP.NET application. Nowadays, many app on IIS is running using the worker-process. IIS port 80 is sedom down but the app may error or return 404. I read the brochure F5 is capable to do app stack monitor and what we require:
1. How we can monitor the app stack (db, app page, web services etc) in F5?
2. set the monitor frequency?
3. make user transparency when one app on one server fail
4. per app per server fail-over
Anyone can give more comment on these areas? Many thanks.
Best Regards,
Kenny
Hi Kenny,
Good questions.
On question 1:
In the section called Creating the HTTP health monitor in http://www.f5.com/solutions/deployment/iis_bigip9_dg.html:
There are 2 areas that you can send and receive strings to your application. This is pretty extensible because you can put in any valid HTTP command that you can post to the server. The Receive string will be what the BigIP looks for to determine if the application is up and running.
Additionally if you are looking to see if say 2 applications are working like the application and the database we can support a health monitor for that too. These are pretty extensive and I’d suggest that you take a look at this section in our application guide at:
https://tech.f5.com/home/bigip-next/manuals/bigip9_4/bigip9_4config/BIGIP_LTM_CONFIG_GD_9_4-13-1.htmlwp1201151
(The login is free)
On question 2:
This really is a 'depends' answer. You will need to look at striking a balance for how fast you need to determine if the server is up or vs. the amount of traffic / load you want to see on the server. On that same page as I mentioned above, you can set the interval for testing and then when you feel it has timed out.
We typically recommend the timeout be 3 x plus one second the amount of the interval test time; if you were doing a 20 second check the timeout interval would be 61 seconds. It is important to consider that on occasions a packet would be lost and you may not want to immediately mark the server down. So in the example above the monitor will try doing a check every 20 seconds; if in the span or 61 seconds it does not get a response it will mark the server down.
On question 3:
I'm not sure I understand this yet. Are you asking to have the user moved to another server if the one they were connected to is not working? If that is the case, this is typical BigIP behavior that when a server is down in the pool of servers we will mark that server as down and no longer route traffic to it. We will then balance any connections that had been going to now downed server to other servers in the load balanced pool.
BigIP transfers the session from one server to the other but the session can be a different thing. This really depends on the application and how it maintains session state. There are lots of options for this and at one end of the extreme the application can do state sharing across several servers to cover for this and at the other end of the extreme the customer may need to log back in to get a new session.
On question 4:
I'm not sure I understand this one yet. Can you fill me in with more details? Are you looking for running several different services on one server and one service could be down but the other service is up? If so, then BigIP is balancing the applications across the servers and we can easily support you there.
Best regards- Hi Kenny,
Annother option is to look at our transparent ore reverse modes of monitors too. These can let you ping through devices on your network. For more info on this see:
https://tech.f5.com/home/bigip-next/manuals/bigip9_4/bigip9_4config/BIGIP_LTM_CONFIG_GD_9_4-13-1.htmlwp1215710
- James
