F5 - LTM (Local Traffic Manager)

LTM is a service to intelligently distribute incoming application traffic across multiple servers, ensuring efficient load balancing and high availability.

Here’s the current topology of my lab

F1 and F2 are linux servers serving web on port 80 (http)

The plan is to load balance the web request coming to these 2 servers using LTM. Let’s start!

Configuring Pool

To configure pool, go to Local Traffic » Pools, and Create New

Here the Health Monitor is set to http (port 80), the Load Balancing Method is Round Robin and the members are the F1 and F2 servers.

After a while, the status should turn green indicating the HTTP Health monitor detecting the web services are up on the servers.

Configuring Virtual Server

Go to Local Traffic » Virtual Servers, Create new

The destination is the Virtual Sever’s own IP Address, and the service port is on port 80.

Then scroll to all the way at the bottom, set the default pool to the pool that has just been created.

After a while, the Virtual Server Status should also turn green indicating the Pool is up and reachable on port 80.

And that’s pretty much it for the configuration of LTM, now proceed with testing.

Testing the LTM Load Balancing

To test it, simply access the Virtual Server’s web service on port 80, which the ip is 198.18.0.85

This Virtual Server should alternate serving the web service between server F1 and server F2 after each refresh because it is set to have load balancing method of round robin.

Going to Module Statistics, it shows the counter of how many times the virtual server has been hit along with some details of each member’s traffic data