This five day course gives network professionals a functional understanding of load balancers, global load balancers, application security and policy manager. Incorporating lecture, extensive hands-on labs with Troika iLabs, and classroom discussion, the course helps students build the well-rounded skill set needed to manage various load balancers including F5 BIGIP LTM systems as part of a flexible and high performance application delivery network

Candidates must have basic understanding on ip addressing, routing and switching technologies.
Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Explain the features and advantages of the server load balancer, global server load balancer, application policy manager & security manager (ASM)
• Perform advance configuration of the application delivery controller  including:
  • Load balancing and persistence concepts
  • Monitors, including scripted monitors and managing multiple monitors
  • Modifying traffic behavior with profiles, including SSL offload
  • Implementing SNATs
  • Highly Availability, including Sync-Failover and Sync-Only device groups
  • Configuring iRules
  • Understanding SDNS (GTM) concepts
  • Overview of application policy manager
  • Overview of OWASP top10 vulnerabilities & application security
  • Application delivery controller Design considerations – design and best practices in modern datacenter

Module 0 – overview of Application delivery controller’s

• Introducing server load balancer concepts
  • Content networking
  • Deployment scenarios
    • reverse proxy ,
    •  transparent proxy,
    • triangle proxy/nPath
  • Syn load balancing, delayed binding, HTTP header load balancing , TCP proxy , full proxy TCP connections vs HTTP Transaction
  • Platform architecture
    • SMP vs CMP
  • HTTP and other protocol overview
  • Packet flow & design practices
• Initial configuration to set up load balancer appliance
• Identifying load balancer traffic processing objects
• Understanding on network packet flow

Module 1 – Load Balancing

• Load balancing concepts
  • Static vs Dynamic load balancing
  • Least connections
  • Fastest
  • Dynamic Ratio
• Priority group activation
• Fallback host
• Load Balancing: Member vs. Node
• Understanding design requirement for optimal load balancing

Module2 –   Monitoring application health

• Introducing Monitors
• Types of Monitors
  • Layer 3 monitors
  • Layer 4 monitors
  • Layer 7 monitors
• Monitor Interval and Timeout Settings
• Scripted Monitors
• Configuring Monitors
• Assigning Monitors to Resources

Module3 – Modifying Traffic Behavior with Persistence & SNAT

• Understanding the Need for Persistence
• Introducing Source Address Affinity Persistence
• Introducing Cookie Persistence
• Managing Object State
• Address Translation on server load balancer System
• NAT requirements
• Solving Routing Issues with NAT
• Configuring SNAT Auto Map on a Virtual Server
• Additional SNAT Options
• Understanding design requirements to implement persistence profiles
• Network design with SNAT

Module 4 – Modifying Traffic Behavior with Profiles & iRules

• Introducing profiles
• Common Protocol Profile Types and Settings
• Understanding Profile Types and Dependencies
  • Client and server side profiles
  • HTTP profile
  • SSL Offloading
  • Stream profiles
• Configuring and Assigning Profiles
• Failover Conditions

Module 5– High Availability

• Understanding on high availability
  • Sync-Failover Group Concepts
  • Synchronization, State and Failover
  • Traffic Group Concepts
• Failover Triggers and Detection
• Stateful Failover, Connection Mirroring
• Persistence Mirroring
• Overview of redundant design with HA groups
• Overview of iRules
• iRules Concepts
• iRule Events
• understanding Irules use case scenario’s

Module 6 – administration & Troubleshooting

• Traffic Management Shell (tmsh)
• Server load balancer Configuration State and Files
• Configuring files & Logging
• UCS & SFC changes
• Using tcpdump and Wireshark on the LB system
• Working with F5 Technical Support

Module 7 – Global server load balancer

• DNS overview and concepts
• Accelerated DNS resolution
• Datacenter load balancing and high availability
• Understanding  Wide IP’s , DNS cache, GTM listener , links, Wide IP pools
• LDNS probe configuration
• Monitors in GTM environment
• Introduction to advance topics such as DNSSEC

Module 8 – Overview of Access policy manager

• Understanding application access using APM
• APM Access Policies, Access Profiles
• Visual Policy Editor, Branches and Endings
• APM Network Access and BIG-IP Edge Client
• Layer 4 and Layer 7 Access Control Lists
• APM Application Access and Webtop Types
• Remote Desktop, Optimized Tunnels and Webtop Links
• LTM Concepts including Virtual Servers, Pools, Monitors and SNAT’ing
• APM + LTM Use Case for Web Applications
• AAA Servers and Authentication and Authorization with Active Directory and RADIUS
• Endpoint Security with Windows Process Checking, Protected Workspace and Firewalls

Module9 –   Application security

• Overview of top 10 web application vulnerabilities
  • Cross site scripting
  • SQL injection
  • Parameter tempering
• Securing  web based application using application security manager
• Deployment scenarios with positive and negative security model
• Understanding packet flow with ASM