F5 System Engineer LTM Certified

Yesterday I passed the second and final exam in the F5 System Engineering track F50-522. Without breaking NDA lets go into an overview of the exam :
- As I mentioned in LTM Essentials F50-521 exam, the questions are mostly based on theory. So you need to know hot things works instead of how things are done. Having more then 3 years of hands on with those devices, I really had hard time on some of the questions :)
- Majority of the questions requires you to have a deep understanding of Virtual Server types (network,transparent,forwarding), SNAT/NAT concepts like automap and how source and destination IP@ changes from client to member node.
- Master the iRules. Know the context for each method. Know how context changes the behavior of local_address/remote_address etc..
- Master TCL functions like findstr,starts_with,ends_with etc..
- Know variety of logging options like alertd,syslog-ng and snmpd
- And for sure you need to have a good understanding of how HTTP works. Cookies, Keep-alive messages and their interaction with One-Connect profiles, XForward headers etc..

F5 BigIP Virtual Edition

F5 released a trial version of their famous LTM (Local Traffic Manager) product. The product is valid for 90 days trial use. It can be a great candidate for testing the product for your virtual environment or building a home lab for your F5 Certification studies.(F50-521 and F50-522 exams)

First download the file for your VMware virtual platform (ESX(i) vSphere or Workstation 7)

https://downloads.f5.com/esd/product.jsp?sw=BIG-IP&pro=big-ip_ve&prodesc=BIG-IP+Virtual+Edition

Then generate a registration key for your product that will be used to create the dossier file for activation during initial setup. You can have up to 4 registration keys e-mailed to you :

https://www.f5.com/trial/secure/generate-eval-key.php

The virtual machine has :

1 GB RAM
3 NIC (should be possible to additional NIC for redundant pair heartbeat traffic)
10 GB vdisk

NOTE : Don't try to decrease memory, otherwise you will have problems allocating additional modules to LTM.

You can find the detailed installation document on :
https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ve/releasenotes/product/relnotes_ve_10_1_0.html

F5 Big IP LTM Certification

I've been planning to have F5 certification for a long time. Last Tuesday I had a chance to take and pass the fist exam of F5 System Engineering track which is the F50-521 LTM essentials exam. That makes me certified as F5 Product Consultant - Local Traffic Management. 10th IT certification in my museum :)

 As part of NDA I will not go into the details but will give an overview of the exam :

- First of all Student/Instructor guide is not alone sufficient for the exam. You should also take a look on product documentation. The exam is currently covering 9.4 material.
- Apart from the practical side of the devices, you should mostly focus on the theory. I didn't get any lab question like I had in Cisco exams.
- Knowing the theory of NAT/SNAT, iRule, some of the TCL function syntax, VS, Pool and Profile details, redundancy/failover concepts will help you a lot in the exam.
- You will need 76% to pass out of 50 questions. If all questions have the same weight that means you have a chance to make 12 mistakes.

Next week I will also take the F50-522 Advanced exam for the F5 System Engineer certification. Good luck to me ;-)

NOTE : I'm still preparing for the RHCE lab. I will also put updates on the blog about that.

Tip of the day : Networking - How to Find the Files to Backed Up in an UCS Archive on F5 Big IP LTM Load Balancer

Apart from the articles I decided to publish small tips on my website. Sometimes those kind of tips can be more useful then big documents. Todays tip is based on the F5 Big IP LTM Load Balancer. One of my favorite network device :) I used this command on 9.x should also be working on 10.

Files to be included inside UCS :

grep save.*.file /usr/libdata/configsync/cs.dat

Directories to be included inside UCS :

grep save.*.dir /usr/libdata/configsync/cs.dat

Excluded files from UCS :

grep save.*.ignore /usr/libdata/configsync/cs.dat

For more details check the F5 article on : https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/4000/400/sol4422.html