1. F5 Application Designer Extensions F5 Management Pack
Performance Based Load Balancing (Scenario #3)
Update LTM Pool Member load-balancing ratios based on system-performance / provisioning
The F5 Application Designer Extensions are application specific management packs built on top of the core F5 Management Pack. They provide holistic monitoring and auto-configuration support for various server platforms and application environments fronted by F5 devices (such as IIS 7, SharePoint 2007/2010, VMM Server 2008/R2). The traditional way of monitoring all these applications in System Center Operations Manager is mostly scoped to the individual platform itself rather than a unified health monitoring view of the whole application environment.
Here’s where the F5 Application Designers come into play and wire the apps together into a unified health monitoring diagram, as “Application Instances”, enabling a more comprehensive view of the applications’ health in System Center Operations Manager.
With this presentation we continue on presenting a series of sessions centered around various Data Center Orchestration scenarios, where the F5 App Designer extensions not only help with the overall health monitoring of a complex application environment, but also provide automatic intelligent decisions based on certain health monitor conditions.

2. F5 Application Designer View
With the F5 Application Designer extensions, the F5 LTM Pool Members are paired with their related application components (such as Windows servers, Web servers, Virtual servers, SharePoint servers, etc) and the resulting object hierarchies are wired together as “Application Instances” grouped within an “Application Instance Group”, which ultimately is paired with the related F5 LTM Virtual Server, making up the “Overall Application” monitoring object. Such an application can be for example the entire deployment of an ecommerce web-farm, monitored within System Center Operations Manager.
The health of the App Instance by default represents the worst health of any of it's member components. In turn, the overall Application's health depends on at least one of the App Instances being healthy as well as the health of the underlying LTM Virtual Server.

3. Prerequisites
Install the F5 Management Pack (
Windows Server 2008 Internet Information Services 7 management pack (MS System Center catalog)
System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 management pack (MS System Center catalog)
Windows Server 2008 Operating System (Discovery) management pack (MS System Center catalog)
F5 Application Designer Library extension packs (
Core App Designer: Common Library
IIS App Designer: Microsoft Internet Information Server 2008

4. Preparation
Discover F5 device (with at least 1 LTM Virtual Server and 2 LTM Pool Members)
Discover IIS 7 web servers (expected to run on the LTM Pool Members discovered above)
Discover overall application deployment (F5 + IIS 7) (see details here):
Look for the topic on “discovering an existing application” (here)

5. Scenario
Set the load-balancing method for the targeted LTM Pool to “Ratio (member)”
Start by setting the Ratio on both LTM Pool Members to 1
Provision LTM Pool Member 1 (virtual machine) with 2GB of RAM
Provision LTM Pool Member 2 (virtual machine) with 4GB of RAM
See how the load balancing ratios on LTM Pool Member 1 and LTM Pool Member 2 get updated (automatically) to 33 and 67 respectively, following the capacity (total memory) of the LTM Pool Members

6. That’s it! We just went through a very simple load-balancing scenario ruled by the F5 Application Designer. There will be other similar scenarios following. I hope you found this video useful. For more information visit F5 Networks / Dev Central. Thanks for tuning in!