application selection on the bases of health

[usman ali dar]

Dear all,

i am trying to configure two ace boxs for applications server and want to configure the aces in such away that when we there is a request to cisco ace it should determined the server with the help of health monitoring like probes. like if we have some applications with some urls the probes should be checking the url rather than appliances hardware itself.

one last thing how to really get the config done with Quality of service on ace boxs

for any help will be highly appriciated.

regards

[Kanwaljeet Singh]

Hi Usman,

You should look into ACE user guide "Health Monitoring" section to have more details about how ACE health checks the servers/applications.

You can have ICMP, TCP, UDP, HTTP etc based PROBES depending upon your requirement and ACE would check the availablitiy periodically and will take load balancing decision depending upon the status of server in serverfarm which would be failed or operational depending upon the probe result.

Let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Kanwal

[usman ali dar]

Thank you kanwal for this response, the matter is i dd config some of the probes for health monitoring. what really i want to do is that we have a single sign on for different applications like LDAP, DNS, Cache, proxy, web, database and such like that so when a user sign in and ask for some web service application it go to ace and ace resolve it on the back end from a group of servers. Now wat i really want ace to do is to check the health of the applicaiton not the machine which is like if the application is ready to provide required service or not.

for example if the we have a java web app which is integrated with the oracle database but it provide all services through web front end. now if the database is down and web application is working it can not resolve the query or provide the services however user can login and see the weblogin page and can also do that and see the other important featuers but when it asked something to do with database it will fail...thats wat i want to moniter that ace should be knowing the health of the application and its services to that ace can point out to right server

i hope to hear from you soon...

thanks

[Kanwaljeet Singh]

Hi Usman,

Not sure how this application works but if it is something which is HTTP you can configure HTTP based probing to monitor the application itself. You can also configure scripts but i am not good at them to help you out but similar questions have been asked before in community and a quick search regarding scripting based probes should throw up some discussions around this subject.

Regards,

Kanwal

[Kanwaljeet Singh]

Hi Usman,

Here's the information regarding QOS from routing and briding guide:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/interfaces_modules/services_modules/ace/vA5_1_0/configuration/rtg_brdg/guide/AceRteGd.pdf

Enabling Quality of Service for a Port

By default, Quality of Service (QoS) is disabled for each physical Ethernet port  on the ACE appliance. You can enable QoS for a configured physical Ethernet port that is based on VLAN Class of Service (CoS) bits (priority bits that segment the traffic in eight different classes of service). If a VLAN header is present, the

CoS bits are used by the ACE appliance to map frames into class queues. If the frame is untagged, it falls back to a default port QoS level for mapping.

Note

QoS is configurable only for a physical Ethernet port and is not VLAN interface-based.When you enable QoS on a port (a trusted port), traffic is mapped into different ingress queues based on their VLAN CoS bits. If there are no VLAN CoS bits, or QoS is not enabled on the port (untrusted port), the traffic is then mapped into the lowest priority queue.You can enable QoS for an Ethernet portconfigured for fault tolerance (see the “Designating an Ethernet Port as an FT VLAN Port”). In this case, heartbeat packets are always tagged with CoS bits set to 7 (a weight of High).

Note

We recommend that you enable QoS on the FT VLAN port to provide higher priority for FT traffic.

To enable QoS for a physical Ethernet port, use the qos trust cos command.

The syntax for this command is as follows:

qos trust cos

Regards,

Kanwal