Big-IP F5 LTM Load Balancer Documentation Script with Powershell

Here is a script I whipped up to perform a report on your Big-IP LTM load balancers using powershell. The report currently includes the virtual servers, pools, and various bits of status information on both. Big-IP iControl modules are needed (for obvious reasons).

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BIG-IP: Quick Tip

They silently (well maybe not so silent as I didn’t check if it was announced) published an internal tool that the F5 support engineers use for troubleshooting Big-ip load balancer configuration dumps. With a login account you can access this tool at the aptly named URL of http://ihealth.f5.com. This has some really cool info that you might fine useful in resolving load balancer issues in your environment.

Big-IP: Custom IIS SOAP Monitor

In working on a production issue with my company’s flagship SaaS product I worked with some of the brilliant F5 engineers to isolate one web server in the load balanced pool which was intermittently failing. The F5 engineer recommended a health monitor that does more than just poll for a static page. He suggested we implement some kind of soap call to make the application pool do some work and return a result (I guess in case the IIS application pool is misbehaving but not down). So I worked with one of our developers to do just that but ran into some caveats which required yet another custom health monitor.

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