developing monitors to start services

With iControl, you can automate the on/off for each of your servers. I'd look at the Pool and PoolMember interfaces to be able to enable/disable pool members.

 

 

I'm a little unclear as to what you mean by having BIG-IP "start the service on the standby node". If by this you mean, have BIG-IP enable routing to the standby server while removing routing to the primary, then the answer is yes. If you are asking whether we can trigger internal services on the standby node (ie start an application, etc), then that is beyond the scope of BIG-IP or iControl.

 

 

Not knowing what application you are exposing to your users, you could create a health monitor and have BIG-IP do all this transparently. But, that would depend on whether BIG-IP had a supported monitor that made sense for your application.

 

 

Typically, customers who have special applications, will create a "monitoring" application that constantly polls the node to determine their health. If it finds one is not doing so well, it will use iControl to inform BIG-IP to take the offending node out of rotation. When the monitoring application finds that the nodes health is back again, it will re-provision the node in BIG-IP's load balancing.

 

 

I'm not sure if this answered your question directly or it. If not, if you could elaborate a bit more on exactly what steps you want to perform (ie. what does service down mean?, etc) then I might be able to shed some more light.

 

 

Good Luck!

 

 

-Joe