Application Ready Solution Templates

F5 White Paper
Application Ready Solution
Templates
Streamlining the deployment of optimized applications.
by Lori MacVittieTechnical Marketing Manager, Application ServicesWhite Paper Application Ready Solution Templates
Contents
Introduction 3
Introducing Templates 4
Using Templates 5
Conclusion 8
2White Paper Application Ready Solution Templates
Introduction
Understanding what is happening at the application level is one of the keys to ensuring that applications are secure, fast, and available. You must be able to inspect every packet from the perspective of the network and the application, which requires the ability to examine the payload and understand it as an application message. Then the controls must be in place to transform, redirect, and deliver those packets. This is sometimes called "application fluency" and is at ® ®the heart of the F5 BIG-IP family of products.
As products evolve and include more options, these controls become increasingly complex and their configuration and management becomes necessarily more difficult. And as application delivery solutions become more unified, integrating multiple focus points into a single platform, this complexity grows even more. When that solution is focused on delivering applications, the solution's specific behavior and its environment must also be taken into consideration during configuration. Configuring this type solution for optimal execution is almost overwhelming.
F5 BIG-IP application delivery solution has always included a wide variety of options for optimizing not only the applications it is responsible for, but its own performance as well. Therefore, administrators must not only understand the network and the BIG-IP solution, but the applications being managed as well. In order to configure the BIG-IP device so it ensures the secure, fast, and available delivery of applications, administrators must deal with a lot of different variables, not to mention the time and effort involved in optimizing the entire infrastructure.
In addition, BIG-IP administrators must have a depth of knowledge of both network and application specifics in order to create an optimized configuration.
F5 has developed and published Application Ready Solution guides to assist administrators in optimizing BIG-IP deployments for both specific applications such as Oracle, Microsoft, Siebel, and SAP, as well as generic applications delivered via HTTP. While these deployment guides have reduced the effort required to configure BIG-IP devices, configuration still requires manual intervention.
Manual configuration is time-consuming, tedious, error-prone, and increases in complexity with every additional product or feature module deployed on ®the BIG-IP device. The addition of security with BIG-IP Application Security ManagerT (ASM), for example, necessitates additional configuration and testing above and beyond what is required to configure core BIG-IP devices to deliver applications.
33White Paper Application Ready Solution Templates
In an effort to simplify the process of configuring BIG-IP according to best practices, in the newest BIG-IP version (v10) will include a new feature called "Templates."
Introducing Templates
Templates are modules of code, resources, and documentation that enable BIG-IP product modules to be optimally configured to work alone and in-concert for specific applications. Here, the term application is used broadly to mean a system of hardware and software that performs a business function. These may be branded applications such as Oracle or Exchange, or applications such as load balancing generic HTTP servers or other F5 products. These templates simplify the creation of virtual servers, pools, profiles, monitors, F5 iRulesT scripting language, and other pertinent configuration parameters needed to optimize BIG-IP deployments for specific applications like SharePoint.
The resulting profiles created through the use of Application Ready Solution Templates are portable, and can be easily shared with other deployed BIG-IP systems. The profiles can also be further tailored to address unique situations and environments so applications are as fast and secure as possible.
The templates contain common default values and minimize the number of GUI clicks required to configure the BIG-IP device.... [download for more]