I’ve done quite a bit of work with HP’s Virtual Connect and C7000 blade enclosures in a contained (almost pure HP) environment. Today I ran into an issue which flummoxed both myself and an on-site engineer while attempting to connect the VC 8gb interconnect bays to the Cisco MDS fiber module for an upcoming (and exciting!) VMAX implementation.
Continue readingIn 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.
Continue readingWhile specing out a Sharepoint 2007 to 2010 migration I discovered that the default monitor created by the application template on our big-ip LTM load balancers does not work. In seeking a solution I ran across this gentleman’s blog with a custom external monitor but found that it didn’t really work. The solution to make it work was simple (as I explained on his blog in a comment). I went ahead and extended it to be more environment generic.
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