F5 Networks announced F5® Enterprise Manager™ Version 2.2, a centralized management solution that enables enterprises to effectively monitor and manage multiple F5 BIG-IP Application Delivery Controllers (ADCs). With this release, the Enterprise Manager solution is also now available as a virtual appliance, giving customers greater flexibility in building hybrid physical-virtual environments to maximize efficiency. The Enterprise Manager Virtual Edition offering represents F5’s commitment to provide customers greater choice and flexibility when deploying both physical and virtual solutions.
Enterprise Manager gives customers a single-pane view of their entire application delivery infrastructure in real time, and provides monitoring and management tools for optimizing performance and scaling the infrastructure to meet business needs. Version 2.2 of Enterprise Manager includes the following enhancements:
In an effort to scale virtualized infrastructures, limit IT costs, and keep up with rapidly growing demand, many organizations deploy multiple BIG-IP solutions—both physical and virtual—to intelligently optimize applications and network performance. Whether organizations are managing these solutions within the corporate firewall or off premises as part of a managed service or cloud solution, they need a flexible management platform that enables them to manage multiple ADCs. With Enterprise Manager Version 2.2, customers now have the choice of deploying a virtual or physical appliance. The virtual edition can help customers reduce upfront costs, enable faster deployments, save space in data centers, and alleviate the need for hardware certifications for IT personnel.
As customers migrate to 2K SSL keys and begin to realize the resulting performance impact on their application servers, they need a way to easily track and evaluate transactions per second information for their ADCs. Enterprise Manager Version 2.2 adds new reporting features to capture current and historical SSL transactions per second data, enabling customers to analyze and compare average and peak usage against maximum thresholds. With this information, customers are better equipped to plan for capacity increases by upgrading SSL licensing or hardware platform capabilities to meet their application needs.
Enterprise Manager Version 2.2 automatically tracks service contract end dates, includes them in reports, and can send alerts to administrators prior to service contracts ending. This feature eliminates the need for manual tracking, helping administrators ensure that there is never a lapse in service coverage for critical BIG-IP devices.
Enterprise Manager traditionally stores performance data in an internal MySQL database. Although external databases and reporting services could access the MySQL database, external databases could not store performance data directly. For customers that prefer to store performance monitoring statistics in an external database, Enterprise Manager Version 2.2 now provides that option. This gives customers the ability to configure and dedicate as much storage as they need to collect performance metrics for analysis.