Chapter Outline

This chapter discusses the network configuration needed for a typical traffic-managed server farm. It covers hardware requirements, the layout of the network, IP addresses and DNS entries.

This chapter explains the concepts of the Virtual Traffic Manager architecture, including its system of Virtual Servers, Pools and Rules. It describes how to start managing your first service.

Virtual servers are one of the two fundamental configuration concepts in the Virtual Traffic Manager software. This chapter describes virtual servers in more detail.

A pool is the second of the two fundamental configuration concepts in the Virtual Traffic Manager software. This chapter describes pools in more detail.

Fault Tolerance-resilience to failures of back-end servers or individual Virtual Traffic Manager systems-is covered in this chapter.

Now that you have a basic Virtual Traffic Manager system running, this chapter covers the Virtual Traffic Manager’s performance monitoring and diagnosis functions and other tools in the Virtual Traffic Manager Administration Interface.

This chapter introduces the TrafficScript language, used for writing rules to manage your traffic. It explains how to create rules and gives some examples. A separate Virtual Traffic Manager: TrafficScript Guide describes the Virtual Traffic Manager’s TrafficScript capability in full detail.

This chapter provides details about remote authentication support. Use the mechanisms described in this chapter to add remote user verification to your services.

This chapter describes the Virtual Traffic Manager’s Java Extensions, allowing you to invoke Java code from TrafficScript. A separate Virtual Traffic Manager: Java Development Guide describes the Virtual Traffic Manager’s Java Extensions capability in full detail.

Some protocols can benefit from specific support, and this chapter describes special protocol handlers in the Virtual Traffic Manager.

This chapter describes the Virtual Traffic Manager’s session persistence features. It outlines some useful session persistence strategies and explains how it is set up within the product.

This chapter deals with SSL decryption of incoming traffic, and encryption of requests being sent to the back-end servers. It describes how to set up SSL certificates, authorities and revocation lists within the product and how to apply them to your services.

This chapter discusses the Virtual Traffic Manager’s Health Monitoring capabilities. Health Monitors are used to test the correct operation of back-end server nodes; in the event of a failure, they cause the Virtual Traffic Manager to raise an alert, and to route traffic away from the failed node.

This chapter describes the service protection capabilities of the product. It explains how a class of service protection settings can be defined in the catalog, and used by one or more services.

This chapter describes the bandwidth management capabilities of the product. It explains how a class of bandwidth management settings can be defined in the catalog, and used by one or more services.

This chapter describes how a Virtual Traffic Manager can be used to rate-shape requests to your servers and applications to restrict users’ activities and prevent applications from being overwhelmed by requests.

This chapter describes the service level monitoring of the product. It explains how a class of service level monitoring settings can be defined in the catalog, and used by one or more services.

This chapter describes the Virtual Traffic Manager’s HTTP Content Caching capabilities. You can cache commonly requested Web resources and respond to subsequent requests directly from the cache, rather than forwarding many identical requests to the back-end server nodes.

This chapter covers the Web Content Accelerator and how you can apply Web content optimization to your Web services.

This chapter describes how to control what the Virtual Traffic Manager does when particular events occur, and how to inform or drive external management systems.

This chapter describes additional system level configuration specific to hardware appliance, virtual appliance, cloud instance, and certain software variants of the Virtual Traffic Manager.

This chapter gives tips for secure operation of your Virtual Traffic Managers. It covers firewalling and network design, and Unix software permissions that are relevant to the Virtual Traffic Manager software.

This chapter covers security measures to control access to the Administration Interface, including user authentication against external databases.

This chapter gives a brief introduction to the Virtual Traffic Manager's Control API. For full information, see the separate Virtual Traffic Manager: Control API Guide, available from the Ivanti Web site.

This chapter covers the Command Line Interface in detail, with reference to the Control API methods defined in the Virtual Traffic Manager: Control API Guide.

This chapter describes the zconf command line utility that can be used to perform a fine-grained import/export on individual configuration objects.

Furthering the concept of a cluster of Virtual Traffic Managers, this chapter introduces the idea of combining several clusters into one centrally managed multi-site super-cluster.

The Virtual Traffic Manager provides an internal DNS server capability as an alternative to externally sourced DNS. This chapter discusses the implementation and configuration of the Virtual Traffic Manager DNS server.

This chapter discusses the implementation of Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) within the Virtual Traffic Manager.

This chapter provides details for prospective users looking for information on how FIPS is implemented in the Virtual Traffic Manager.

This chapter discusses the Virtual Traffic Manager's implementation of the Kerberos protocol.

This chapter describes how to investigate and diagnose problems or unexpected behavior with your load-balanced system.

The Glossary defines some terms used in this manual. Some of these terms are used with varying meanings in computing literature, so if in doubt you should refer to this section.