supporting "ratio weight" in third party appliances

Thanks Joe for the response.

 

 

>iControl is our management API that is used to configure and pull statistics from our devices

 

 

Are you saying that iControl can not be used by 3rd party systems as an interface to F5 devices? I did recall reading a document on the iControl interface (SOAP based).

 

 

>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.

 

 

May I understand that our applications running on our device need to support these two methods? If that's the case, it is great!

 

 

>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.

 

 

I'm confused on this one. How does the Big-IP know the stress level of our servers? I understand that Big-IP does LB based on the stress level of the nodes.

 

 

>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.

 

 

Since bridge mode node does not have IP addresses, so I guess bridge mode is not supported

 

 

Regrads, Hongwen