Answer

If you will be using more than one Recovery Solution Server, you must use a load balanced cluster of servers. Recovery Solution supports the following load balancing technologies:

• Microsoft Network Load Balancing
• BIG IP by F5 Networks, Inc.

The load balancer should be installed according to the installation instructions of the manufacturer.

Microsoft Network Load Balancing Tips

Microsoft Network Load Balancing uses a virtual IP and MAC address. If the network hardware is not setup correctly, it can cause network collisions to occur. To prevent this we recommend the following:

• All Recovery Solution Servers are connected to a network hub.
• The network hub is connected to a programmable switch on your network.
• Program the switched port address table with the Network Load Balancing virtual MAC address. Example: if your hub is plugged in to port 8 on your switch, program the switch that the Virtual MAC address is connected as port 8.

Configuring the BIG IP Controller Health Monitors

BIG IP health monitors verify connections and services on nodes that are members of load balancing pools. The monitor checks the node at a set interval. If the node does not respond within a specified timeout period, the node is marked down and traffic is no longer directed to it. By default, an ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol) monitor is associated with every node that is a member of a load balancing pool. This monitor is of the simplest type, checking only the node address and checking only for a ping response. To change the interval and timeout values of this default check, or to check specific services on a node, you need to configure a custom monitor or monitors to add to the default monitor.

For the default icmp monitor, we select the icmp monitor template, as shown below:

monitor type icmp {

interval 5

timeout 16

dest *

}

The ICMP monitor template has three attributes: interval, timeout, and dest, each with a default value. (All monitor templates have these three basic attributes). For the default monitor, template ICMP is used as is, that is, as monitor ICMP with its default attribute values. To change any of these default values, you would need to create a custom monitor based upon ICMP, for example, my_icmp. Only the values that are actually to be changed would need to be specified in the definition of the custom monitor. Therefore, if you wanted to change the timeout values only, you would define the custom monitor as follows:

b monitor my_icmp ’{ use icmp timeout 20 }’

This would create a new monitor in /config/bigip.conf, as show below:

monitor my_icmp{

#type icmp

use "icmp"

interval 5

timeout 20

}

You can display this monitor using the following command:

b monitor my_icmp show

Once the custom monitor exists, you associate it with a node or nodes using the Configuration utility or the bigpipe node command. Example:

b node 11.11.11.1 11.11.11.2 11.11.11.3 monitor use my_icmp

Note:

The nodes are identified by IP address only. ICMP can ping addresses only, not specific ports on addresses. This creates three instances of monitor my_icmp, one for each address. You can display the instances using the command b node monitor my_icmp show.