Solved: Ironport with CSS load balancer

pfillips11 · ‎11-20-2009

Hello,

We are planning to put two Ironport devices load balanced through Cisco CSS devices. The objective is to monitor the mail queue size on the ironport devices as a criteria for load balancer to forward the mails.

If the queu size on any of the Ironport device reaches value "x" then CSS should mark that Ironport as down and forward no more messages till the time queue size doesn't come below "x".

Appreciate any suggestions.

Thank you.

Gilles Dufour · ‎11-20-2009

There are multiple solutions, but it always involve scripting.

First, you need to be able to provide the queue size to the external world either through a special protocol, or http, or snmp, ...

Then you need to build a script on the CSS which will collect the queue size using the proper protocol and extract the queue size from the server response.

You can then use this script as a probe to mark if the server is available or not.

Gilles

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Gilles Dufour · ‎11-20-2009

There are multiple solutions, but it always involve scripting.

First, you need to be able to provide the queue size to the external world either through a special protocol, or http, or snmp, ...

Then you need to build a script on the CSS which will collect the queue size using the proper protocol and extract the queue size from the server response.

You can then use this script as a probe to mark if the server is available or not.

Gilles

pfillips11 · ‎11-20-2009

Thank you Gilles.

In microsoft exchange, we can change the response for "Helo" from 250 to 4xx when a queue size is beyond a certain value. Currently We use inbuilt SMTP script in CSS to achieve the objective from exchange end. I was wondering if there is a similar functionality in Ironport.

Gilles Dufour · ‎11-23-2009

I do not know the Ironport, so I can't comment on this.

pfillips11 · ‎11-20-2009

Also for CSS to collect the data pulled from SNMP, do you know of any known protocol/script that CSS can use to fetch the queue size from the monitoring tool?

Thank you!!

Gilles Dufour · ‎11-23-2009

I do not know of any script ready to use.

You will need to build one yourself.

G.