Is this possible

From what you describe it iRules are capable. However, your question is a bit generic to truly answer your question properly. iRules are typically used to drive traffic under a certain condition in real-time. iControl allows you to integrate application to communicate directly with the LTM unit.

 

 

Thanks,

 

CB

 

The best place to see for yourself is to go into the samples section of this site.

 

 

http://devcentral.f5.com/Default.aspx?tabid=58

 

 

This will list codeshare of iControl and iRules

 

 

CB

A simple description of iRules versus iControl:

 

 

iRules allow you to change the way individual TCP (or many other protocol) connections from a client are handled.

 

 

iControl allows you to change the BIG-IP configuration in a similar way as clicking through the admin GUI, but programmatically. It wouldn't be advisable to try to use iControl to interact with individual connections, in the same way you wouldn't want to try to quickly change the default pool of a VIP in the GUI in order to handle connections.

 

 

For your scenario, it sounds like you could potentially use an iRule and an iControl app to configure the iRule. If the routing information is fairly static you could use an iControl application which periodically checks the routing configuration from the database and updates a datagroup on LTM which the iRule references for selecting how to handle connections. Or if you can make the routing information available via HTTP/S, you could possibly use an iRule to make a request to the routing information web page and then handle the client connection based on that response.

 

 

If you can provide more details on the scenario and requirements, people here can try to give you more detailed implementation suggestions.

 

 

Aaron

Thank you this is very helpful.

 

 

We want to provide customers with a URL that can get them to the right servers or pool of servers for a particular service. In some cases the URL should be sufficient to identify the pool of servers , in other cases we need to know the customer id (as a URL parameter) to direct them to the correct server. The assumption is that the customer id is either provided by the customers portal or we'll prompt them for it if its absent. Operationally we also want to integrate this logic with our operational database and the F5 so that we avoid human errors and reduce the steps to update information about which servers support what services and customers.

 

 

Based on the description above, it seems like I'll need to create an iRule that obtains the re-direction rules from a datagroup in the F5. I'll then need to write an iControl to update this datagroup from our operations database that manages which servers are allocated to what services.