BIG IP F5 LTM Tutorial - Part 4

1. Overview

Ø  Default IP Address of BIG IP : 192.168.1.254

Ø  By Default, Default route is not installed in BIG IP, need to Configure manually.

Ø  License can be configured manually or auto, without licenses BIG IP features will not be visible.

Ø  BIG IP can be configured through Console, telnet/ssh, CLI Config utility or through web based mode.

Ø  Default Users: CLI: - User - root , Pass : default , Web : User – admin , Pass : admin.

Ø  In every BIG IP hardware there will be primary OS known as TMM : Traffic mgmt microkernel

Ø  In every BIG IP hardware there will be secondary OS known as: AOM or SCCP.

  o   AOM : Always On Management

  o   SCCP : Switch Card Control Processing

Ø  SSL Chip: TMOS has its own SSL stack and can process SSL entirely in software, but it is much faster to offload cryptographic operations to specialized SSL ASICs.

Ø  Switch Fabric in BIG IP F5

Ø  Hardware & software details :

The Switch Module, where all application delivery traffic enters and exits, connects to the PVA (Packet Velocity ASIC), F5’s custom-engineered L4 load balancing ASIC switching fabric. Traffic that can be handled within the PVA never goes any further; at this step, all packet and connection management occurs at the hardware level by the PVA through the Switch Module. Traffic enters through the switch into the PVA, where the appropriate logic and transformations are applied before the traffic is sent back out through the Switch Module. Generically speaking, this is typically referred to as the fastL4 profile.  For traffic and which is not handled by the PVA, it is simply passed through the PVA onto the next layer, which F5’s primary traffic management processing system is called TMM (Traffic Management Microkernel). TMM handles all of BIG-IP’s local traffic functionality such as intelligent load balancing, compression, SSL, iRules, packet filters, etc. (with the exception of L4-only load balancing, which can be handled in either the PVA or TMM). The TMM can manage traffic using several optional hardware acceleration modules such as SSL, FIPS, and Compression and has entirely dedicated hardware. TMM is also responsible for delivering traffic to the Host Management subsystem as necessary for products such as BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM).

Note : For more Detail please refer : http://www.f5.com/pdf/white-papers/tmos-dev-wp.pdf