Table of Contents
Overview of CFM
This chapter provides an overview of the Content Flow Monitor (CFM) application. It contains the following sections:
CFM is web-based status monitoring application within the CiscoWorks2000 product family for managing Cisco server load balancing devices. CFM leverages Cisco's ContentFlow Architecture (CoFA) to intelligently discover the roles and relationships of server load balancing devices.
CFM monitors the content delivery network, and presents up-to-date aggregated device health status, service availability, detailed device configuration, and real time performance statistics. CFM reduces network management complexity and provides status monitoring capabilities for Cisco server load balancing devices.
CFM supports the following content delivery network architectures:
- Stand-alone LocalDirector---LocalDirector is a turnkey solution with an embedded operating system. It is used for easy installation and low management with advanced load balancing features, such as SSL sticky and packet coloring. It is a local load balancer and supports up to 240-Mbps throughput and 18,000 connections per second.
- MultiNode Load Balancing (MNLB)---Load balancing solution that uses a multinode architecture, with multiple load balancing devices working in tandem to achieve the highest level of availability, scalability, and performance for server applications.
You can use CFM to monitor the following entities:
- Services manager---The brains of server load balancing, a services manager makes load balancing decisions based on application availability, server capacity, and load distribution algorithms, such as round robin or least connections. Using load balancing and server/application feedback, the services manager determines a real server for the packet flow and sends this information to the requesting forwarding agent. Once the optimal destination is decided, all other packets in the packet flow are directed to a real server by the forwarding agent, increasing packet throughput.
- Forwarding agent---Packet redirector that forwards packets based on decisions made by the services manager. The forwarding agent filters packets coming into the virtual network and sends packets without a known server destination to the services manager.
- Real server---Physical computing engine or part of a physical computing engine that offers one or more application services to a set of clients in the network. This includes Windows NT or Solaris servers.
- Virtual server---Presents a single virtual IP address that represents an application server farm for clients.
For more information on terms and acronyms used in the CFM documentation set, refer to the glossary at the end of this document.
Designed for customers using Cisco server load balancing devices to load balance traffic in a large TCP/IP network or mixed SNA and TCP/IP networks, CFM enables network administrators to monitor Cisco server load balancing devices from a web browser on any workstation on the network.
The CFM management environment is established via SNMP which is integrated into TCP/IP devices. CFM uses SNMP to communicate directly with services managers and forwarding agents. However, CFM cannot communicate directly with real servers. The services manager acts as a proxy and provides status and performance information to CFM for virtual servers and real servers.
CFM provides the following features:
- Monitoring of Cisco server load balancing devices
- From the CFM Main window, CFM provides dynamic status information for all Cisco server load balancing devices being monitored. This window provides color-coded status where the color of the resource name indicates the status of the resource.
- Viewing associations between devices
- From the CFM Main window, you can view the relationships between the Cisco server load balancing devices. You can determine the real servers associated with a specific virtual server. You can also determine the services manager or LocalDirector with which a virtual server is associated.
- CFM periodically collects performance statistics for Cisco server load balancing devices at predefined monitoring intervals. You can view the collected performance statistics from statistical windows for each device.
- You can access the CFM server using a web browser running on any workstation. Multiple users can access the CFM server simultaneously.
- Integration with CiscoWorks2000
- You can launch the CFM client from the CiscoWorks2000 desktop. Also, CFM shares the common web server, user management, and security management model with CiscoWorks2000.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what CFM is and what it does, the next question that you might ask is, "Where do I start?" This section endeavors to answer that question.
Table 1-1 lists the tasks necessary to use CFM to monitor Cisco server load balancing devices. This table also indicates the section, chapter, or document that provides more information on the task.
Posted: Sun Apr 2 12:29:17 PDT 2000
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