f5 Load Balancing Configuration (Basics)
F5 Load Balancing is a high-performance load balancing device that distributes network traffic to multiple servers to improve system availability and performance. In this article, we will cover the basics of F5 load balancing and how to configure it.
What is F5 load balancing?
F5 Load Balancing is a network device that distributes network traffic to multiple servers to improve system availability and performance.F5 Load Balancing can implement a variety of load balancing algorithms, such as polling, weighted polling, least-connected, etc., to meet load balancing needs in different scenarios.
How do I configure F5 load balancing?
The following steps are required to configure F5 load balancing:
1. Connect to F5 load balancing appliance
First of all, you need to connect to F5 load balancing appliance via SSH or web interface. When connecting via SSH, you need to authenticate with an administrator account and password.
2. Creating a virtual server
In F5 load balancing, a virtual server is the core concept of load balancing. A virtual server can distribute traffic to multiple back-end servers. In F5 load balancing, you need to create virtual servers first and then bind them to back-end servers.
3. Configuring a virtual server
After creating a virtual server, you need to configure it. Configuring a virtual server includes the following steps:
-Specify the IP address and port number of the virtual server;
-Specify the load balancing algorithm of the virtual server;
-Specify the session hold method of the virtual server;
-Specify the health check method of the virtual server.
4. Add a back-end server
After configuring the virtual server, you need to bind it to a back-end server. In F5 Load Balancing, you can add a back-end server by IP address, hostname, or domain name. After adding a back-end server, you need to perform a health check on it to ensure that it is functioning properly.
5. Configure pools
After binding virtual servers to back-end servers, you need to create pools. A pool is a collection of backend servers that share the same IP address and port number. When configuring a pool, you need to specify the load balancing algorithm and session hold method.
6. Configuring Health Checks
After you configure a pool, you need to perform health checks on it. The health check detects the status of the back-end servers and removes unavailable servers from the pool. In F5 load balancing, health checks can be performed using ICMP, TCP, and HTTP.
7. Configuring SNAT
When configuring F5 load balancing, you need to consider source address translation (SNAT). If SNAT is not configured, then the back-end servers will not be able to recognize the IP addresses of the clients correctly. In F5 load balancing, source address translation can be implemented through SNAT pools.
8. Configure SSLoffload
When configuring F5 load balancing, you need to consider SSL offload, which improves system performance by decrypting SSL-encrypted traffic before load balancing. In F5 load balancing, SSL offload can be achieved through SSL certificates, SSL configuration files, and other means.
What does load balancing and F5 mean?
Often heard technology mentioned the word load balancing, and F5, from the Internet to find some information to do a knowledge of popularization, I hope to help friends who want to understand this knowledge. Load balancing and F5 is what it is, as follows:
Load balancing (also known as load sharing), the English name is LoadBalance, which means that the load (workload) is balanced, apportioned to a number of operating units for execution, such as Web servers, FTP servers, enterprise-critical application servers and other mission-critical servers, so that together to complete the Workload balancing equipment is not basic network equipment. A load balancing device is not a basic network device, but a performance optimization device. For network applications, load balancing is not required at the outset. Load balancing comes into play when access to the network application grows and a single processing unit is unable to meet the load demand, and when the network application traffic is about to become bottlenecked.
F5, which takes its name from the highest level of tornado winds, is the global leader in Application Delivery Networking (ADN). Many of the world’s leading enterprises, service providers and cloud providers, as well as leading online companies, use F5’s load balancing products and solutions to optimize IT investments and drive business. f5’s products in this area include wide-area traffic load balancing, link load balancing and local traffic load balancing, etc., and the exact name of which you can go to the Chinese official website of F5 to check out F5BIG-IP series, for example F5BIG-IP Enterprise Manager, F5VIPRION Application Delivery Controller, F5WANJet WAN Accelerator, F5BIG-IP Web Application Accelerator, F5BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM), F5BIG-IP Link Controller (LC). ……
In the Chinese market, F5 is the first to put forward the concept of load balancing and application delivery, after years of efforts F5 has been maintained in the R & D investment, and many partners, such as vmware, Microsoft and so on in the early stage of the development of any new technology, to carry out close cooperation in software development.
F5 load balancing how to achieve, what is the principle of this?
The principle of F5 load balancing is divided into four steps, the first step is that the customer sends a service request to the VIP, the second step is that the BIG-IP receives the request, changes the destination IP address in the packet to the IP address of the selected back-end server, and then sends the packet to the selected back-end server, and the third step is that the back-end server sends the answer packet back to the BIG-IP according to its routing, and the fourth step is that the BIG-IP will change the source address back to the VIP after receiving the answer packet. In the third step, after the backend server receives the packet, it sends the answer packet back to BIG-IP according to its route. In the fourth step, BIG-IP changes the source address of the answer packet back to the VIP’s address after receiving it and sends it back to the client, thus completing a standard server load balancing process. This is the principle of implementing F5 load balancer to achieve load balancing.
What does load balancing and F5 mean?
1. Load balancing is a technique that refers to the method of load sharing through some algorithm.
In layman’s terms, it is a device that uniformly distributes requests. Load balancing receives all requests uniformly and then distributes them to all members of this load balancing group according to a set algorithm, thus realizing a balanced distribution of requests (load).
2. F5 is a brand of load-balancing products, and its position is similar to that of Nokia in the cell phone brand. In addition to F5, Radware, Array, A10, Cisco, DeepSync and Huaxia Innovation are load balancing brands, because F5 has the greatest impact in this type of product, so it is often said that F5 load balancing.
Expanded Information
The main applications of load balancing:
1. DNS load balancingThe earliest load balancing technology is realized through DNS, where the same name is configured for multiple addresses, and thus clients querying this name will get one of the addresses, thus enabling different clients to access different servers to achieve the purpose of load balancing. The purpose of load balancing is to enable different clients to access different servers.
DNS load balancing is a simple and effective method, but it does not differentiate between servers, nor does it reflect the current state of a server.
2. Proxy server load balancing uses a proxy server, which can forward requests to an internal server, and using this acceleration mode can obviously improve the speed of access to static web pages.
3, address translation gateway load balancing support load balancing address translation gateway, you can map an external IP address to multiple internal IP addresses, for each TCP connection request dynamically use one of the internal address, to achieve the purpose of load balancing.
4, protocol internal support load balancing In addition to these three load balancing methods, some protocols internally support load balancing-related functions, such as the redirection capabilities of the HTTP protocol, HTTP runs at the highest level of the TCP connection.
5, NAT load balancing NAT (NetworkAddressTranslation Network Address Translation) is simply the translation of an IP address to another IP address, generally used for unregistered internal address and legal, has been registered between the Internet IP address conversion.
F5 Load Balancing for F5 Solutions
Load balancing is built on top of the existing network structure, which provides a cheap, effective, and transparent way to extend the bandwidth of network devices and servers, increase throughput, enhance network data processing capabilities, and improve network flexibility and availability. It should be noted that: load balancing equipment is not a basic network device, but a performance optimization device. For network applications, load balancing is not required at the outset. Load balancing plays a role when access to network applications grows and a single processing unit is unable to meet the load demand, and when network application traffic is about to become a bottleneck.
Load balancing has two meanings: first, a single heavy-load computing shared to multiple nodes on the device to do parallel processing, each node device processing end, the results will be summarized, returned to the user, the system processing capacity has been greatly improved, which is often referred to as clustering (clustering) technology. The second layer of meaning is: a large number of concurrent access or data traffic is shared to multiple nodes on the device to deal with, reduce the user to wait for the response time, which is mainly for Web servers, FTP servers, enterprise key application servers and other network applications.
Usually, load balancing is divided according to the different layers of the network (seven layers of the network). Among them, the second layer of load balancing refers to the use of multiple physical links as a single aggregated logical link, which is the link aggregation (Trunking) technology, which is not a stand-alone device, but is a common technology used in switches and other network devices. Modern load balancing technology is usually operated at the fourth or seventh layer of the network, which is the load balancing technology for network applications, it is completely separated from the switch, server and become an independent technical equipment.
In recent years, Layer 4 to Layer 7 network load balancing was first applied in telecom, mobile, banking, and large-scale websites because of their most prominent network traffic bottlenecks. That’s why every time we make a phone call, it goes through a load balancing device. In addition, in many enterprises, with the development of enterprise-critical network application business, the application of load balancing demand is also growing.
Load Balancing for F5
Load balancing is a technique that refers to a method of load sharing by means of some algorithm. In general, it is a device that uniformly distributes requests. Load balancing receives all requests uniformly and then distributes them to all members of this load balancing group according to a set algorithm, thus realizing a balanced distribution of requests (load).
The F5BIG-IPLTM (Local Traffic Manager) is a device that manages the distribution of traffic and content. It provides 12 flexible algorithms to efficiently forward data streams to the cluster of servers it connects to. And facing the user, it is just a virtual server. Users at this point only have access to one server defined on the BIG-IPLTM, the VirtualServer. However, their data flow is flexibly balanced across all physical servers by BIG-IP. BIG-IPLTM can distribute traffic through a variety of load balancing algorithms, including:
RoundRobin
Ratio
Priority
LeastConnection
Fastest mode
Observed mode
Predictive mode
DynamicRatio-APM
Dynamic ServerAct (DynamicServerAct)
Quality of Service (QoS)
Type of Service (ToS)
Rule Mode Model Throughput Configuration Carrying Capacity Key Features F5NetworksBIG-IP16001Gbps Processor: Dual CPU
Memory: 4GB
Hard Drive: 160GB4Reducing Server Load Aspects
Content Transformation
OneConnect
Cache
SSL Acceleration and Offloading
Application Optimization Aspects
Intelligent Application Swapping
Intelligent Compression
Flexible Layer 7 Rate Shaping
TCPExpress
iSessions
WAN Optimization Module (Plug-In Module)
Secure Application Aspects
Resource Hiding and Content Security
Customized Application Attack Filtering
Basic Firewall Functionality – Packet Filtering
Isolation of Protocol Attacks
Network Attack Protection
Selective Encryption
Cookie Encryption
Advanced SSL Encryption Standard
Advanced Client Authentication Module (Plug-in Module)
Spam Filtering Module (Plug-in Module)
Protocol Security Hard Disk Drive: 300GB8F5NetworksBIG-IP69006GbpsProcessor: Dual CPU, Dual Core (4 processors)
Memory: 8GB
Hard Disk Drive: 320GB*216F5NetworksBIG-IP890012GbpsProcessor: Dual CPU, Quad Core (8 processors)
RAM: 16GB
Hard disk drive: 320GB*216