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Mark_Everest_58's avatar
Mark_Everest_58
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
May 09, 2011

Taking individual virtual folders out of a pool in LTM

Hello all,

 

 

I'm a Big-IP pre-newbie (i.e. this is a pre-sales question!)

 

 

 

I am looking at implementing a load-balancing solution in my organisation, not only to assist with application up-time from using a web-farm, but also from a view of taking apps offline to work on / upgrade them without affecting the users.

 

 

 

I've looked on various web pages on the BigIP site and that says about taking 'servers' out of a pool, but can I easily take individual virtual folders out of a pool? Here is my scenario:

 

 

 

Two servers (server1 and server2) have various apps on (e.g. app1, app2, app3) - imaginative names I know!

 

During normal operations requests to these apps will be distributed by the LTM.

 

 

 

I would like to be able to remove Server1\app1 from the pool but still have Server1 responding to requests for the other apps - is this possible?

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

 

 

 

Mark

 

 

 

 

 

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  • Hamish's avatar
    Hamish
    Icon for Cirrocumulus rankCirrocumulus
    May 09, 2011

     

    Absolutely.

     

     

    The load balancing goes from Virtual Server (The IP:Port that listens for inbound client connections on the LTM) to a (Or several) pool. Each pool is comprised of poolmembers which consist of a target IP:Port combination.

     

     

    So taking one poolmember out from a backend server doesn't affect others. In fact you can got even further and have the same poolmember in multiple pools and have SOME of them disabled, and some enabled.

     

     

    H

     

  • Mark_Everest_58's avatar
    Mark_Everest_58
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    May 09, 2011
    Thanks for the quick reply Hamish!

     

     

    So does that mean that each app running on the back-end server(s) will have to have their own IP address / port combination?

     

     

    Currently our servers expose all apps on a single web-site (and IP address) and we use virtual folders to distinguish between applications - would we have to change this model?
  • Hamish's avatar
    Hamish
    Icon for Cirrocumulus rankCirrocumulus
    May 09, 2011
    You can still do software virtual servers. But it means you'll have to provide a slightly modified monitor script for each one (On each pool a different monitor so it specifies the host: header for each one to check availability).

     

     

    H