Here are the answers for your questions:
Q1) What ports are required to communicate from the F5 monitoring service and the f5 itself. Please indicate direction if possible.
A1) The required ports to communicate with an F5 device from the F5 monitoring service are, on the F5 device:
- 443 / HTTPS: iControl connection
- 4353: iQuery connection
On the F5 monitoring host the ports for the connection sockets are allocated dynamically (within the range available on the local TCP/IP stack).
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Q2) Does the f5 monitoring service need to be running on the RMS?
A2) With the current release, the F5 monitoring service should run on a RMS. Support for the Distributed Management Server environment is added within our next release, which is scheduled to be out in a couple of weeks.
Q3) Is there a supported High availability solution/configuration for the f5 monitor? If not, is this a horizon initiative?
A3) Currently there’s no native high-availability configuration built into the F5 Management Pack solution. Although basic failover capability for the F5 monitoring service could be provided through a clustered environment using Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) in the same way any generic .NET Windows service would be made fail-over capable (the F5 monitoring service is a .NET service), there are certain functional aspects that cannot be covered at this time (such as maintaining dual connections to an F5 device). On the other hand, disaster recovery would be maintained by the 'native' SQL-Server and Operations Manager 2007 clustering, which both server platforms support with MSCS. The prospect of adding high-availability support for the F5 Management Pack solution is definitely on our road map, but at this time we don't have a release date set for this feature yet.