supporting "ratio weight" in third party appliances

Joe,

 

Thanks for the reply to my message. I have the following questions:

 

 

>No I am not saying that. iControl is a clientside management API that is most typically used from management systems, not from backend servers (aside from pushing health statistics back into the servers). You wording implied that you needed to "implement" these interfaces, not "use" them. There is a big difference. iControl interfaces are not something you have to implement the code for (ie BIG-IP talking to your server), but rather ones that you use on the client side (your server talking to the BIG-IP).

 

 

I understand that our server needs to talk with Big-IP via the iControl interface of Big-IP, i.e. "use" (not "implement") the iControl interface of Big-IP.

 

 

>Your application only needs to access these methods on the BIG-IP if you need to dynamically update their containing pools load balancing algorithm or their individual load balancing ratios. Again, this typically isn't done in backend code, but rather from a configuration system.

 

 

How frequent do we need to update the Big-IP? From the previous paragraph, it seems that we need to "use" the iControl interface to update the Big-IP. Your this paragraph seems to indicate we can rely on a "configuration system" to do this. Is this "configuration system" something that we need to implement? Where can I find some examples on how backend servers communicate with Big-IP with these two methods?

 

 

>BIG-IP determines how to route traffic based on the load balancing algorithm it's using. Round Robin is a very simple one after the other approach, while ratio allows you to assign weights to each server and traffic will be distributed based on those ratios. There are also least connections, fastest response, and a few others. I'd recommend hitting the BIG-IP LTM manual for more details on load balancing algorithms.

 

 

I did read the LTM manual and understand the LB algorithms. However, I need some help to understand HOW to instruct Big-IP to use these algorithms such as passing the "ratio weight" to Big-IP.

 

 

>With that said, if you do want to make your system more dynamic in nature where the backend servers feed their "health" back into the network in real-time, then you would use the methods described above to dynamically change their "ratios" based on data you have on the backend server.

 

 

That's exactly what we want to do. Any suggestions on where we can get some examples will be very helpful.

 

 

>I don't believe there is an issue as the traffic is IP as it's going through the BIG-IP regardless of whether a device downstream is in bridge mode or not.

 

 

Has Big-IP ever been used in LB of bridges?

 

 

Thanks for the help.

 

Hongwen