supporting "ratio weight" in third party appliances

I think you have a few things confused. iControl is our management API that is used to configure and pull statistics from our devices. Think of it as an alternative to using the admin GUI. Ratio load balancing is an attribute of the pool you are using with each pool member having a ratio attribute.

 

 

Now, if you want to use iControl to set your BIG-IP's configuration, then you can use the LocalLB::Pool::set_lb_method() and LocalLB::PoolMember::set_ratio() methods to update these properties.

 

 

Your questions seem to imply that you need to do something in your backend servers to have them work in ratio mode and that is not the case. In iControl, there are no interfaces you need to implement (outside of the event notification interface for system messages) on your backend servers so I think you are all set.

 

 

As for the bridge mode question, BIG-IP just sees the backend connection as an ip address. Whether or not it's in bridge mode. If the address is up, traffic will be sent to it and if it's down traffic wont. So again, I don't see any issues.

 

 

Hope this helps...

 

 

-Joe