Major objectives and aims of F5 BIG-LTM that needs your attention
When you commit to making your career brighter with any certification, the very first step should be to get the most possible details about it. The list goes like exam code, the importance of it, need and demand of professionals and many more. But the important part is, what are the objectives and skills covered in the examination. Therefore, a thorough study of it is a necessity.
Hence, if you are planning to become an F5 BIG-LTM certified professional, then you must know about the major objectives of examination and the skills that will be acquired and validated through the certification.
But before starting with objectives, here are some additional details that are required to be sure and known about.
Introduction to the company F5
F5 Inc. is a company that was founded in the year 1996, February. It was originally based as the provider of Local balancing products. But later, the company gradually expanded its services and included the security and DDoS for defence in applications.
F5 kept on moving and adding new features to their products. They provide the best digital experience to users, especially with adaptive applications. Such applications which are capable of growing, shrinking, defending, and healing themselves.
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As a whole, the F5 offers application security, cloud, traffic management, orchestration and automation. For these services, they have numerous products including BIG-IP, BIG-IQ, Global server load balancing, Advanced WAF, NGINX and some more.
What is F5 BIG-LTM certification?
F5 is one of the leading companies to provide support to different applications through their products. Many big companies use F5 products to secure and balance the network reaching them. As a consequence, the companies require skilled and trained individuals to manage and maintain the products in the company.
Since these products are related to application security and traffic management, the companies hesitate to hire complete new or clueless candidates. Therefore, F5 introduced F5 certifications.
These certifications are helpful for the employer and employee both. This helps the employer to choose the right candidate easily and helps the candidate to prove his/her skills of managing the products, along with gaining credibility.
F5 BIG-LTM certifications validate the skills required to install, deploy, manage, maintain and troubleshoot the load balancing product offered by F5. Where the LTM stands for Local traffic manager, this product helps to manage the network traffic, speed of application network, inspect and report the network and many more.
Required information about F5 BIG-LTM
Following are some important information related to the F5 BIG-LTM certification examination.
The exam has two sub-tests:
- BIG-IP LTM 301A: BIG-IP LTM 301A LTM Specialist- Architect, Set-up & Deploy exam.
- BIG-IP LTM 301B: BIG-IP LTM Specialist: Maintain and Troubleshoot (Exam 301 B)
Prerequisites:
- BIG-IP LTM 301A: Valid F5-CA, BIG-IP Certification
- BIG-IP LTM 301B: Valid F5-CA, BIG-IP Certification and a valid passing score in exam LTM 301A
Core Objectives of F5 BIG-LTM
- Application delivery testing and verifying through the BIG-IP traffic statistics.
- Safekeeping through the backup of BIG-IP system configuration.
- Describe use cases and differentiate between SSL, SIP, Universal, cookie and destination address affinity persistence.
- Configure pools, virtual servers, profiles, monitors, and persistence objects.
- Configure the priority group activation to activate and manage traffic processes on a load balancing pool.
- member-based vs node-based dynamic load balancing methods.
- Placing of threshold on traffic volume to specific pool members and nodes through configuring connection limits.
- Configuration of VLAN tagging and trunking.
- Description of 3 Match Across Services persistence options and uses it for each.
- Installing and configuring health monitors to have a check on application delivery through a BIG-IP system.
- Configuration of types of virtual services to support different traffic processes through a BIG-IP system.
- Configuration of SNATs to support routing of traffic.
- Configuration of SNMP alerts and traps in support of remote monitoring of the system.
- To customise application delivery through the BIG-IP system, proper use of iRules and local traffic policies.
- Use of packet filters, port lockdown, and virtual server settings to restrict the administrative and application traffic.
- Configuration of SNMP alerts and traps in support routing of traffic through a BIG-IP system.
- Use of LTM features such as eviction policies, iRules, SYN check and Local Traffic Policies to detect and mitigate some common attacks at the networks and layers of applications.
F5 BIG-LTM courses and training
As mentioned above, there are lots of technical and tricky things on which the candidate is being tested.
To get prepared for such complicated concepts, of course, the candidate requires a lot of study and knowledge before appearing in the examination.
The candidate can prepare in three ways:-
- Self-study: the candidates can prepare by themselves. They can collect the blueprint from the official site of F5 and start studying the concepts from different books, online videos, study materials and more. However, this will require more focus, dedication and willpower. There are many sites and channels who provide videos and recommend books for the same.
- Courses provided by the company F5: the official site of F5 has the option of courses and training as well. Before certification, the candidates can subscribe or buy the F5 BIG-LTM course at F5. They provide training through videos, sessions, study materials and more.
- Training centres provide theoretical and practical knowledge: there is another medium of preparation of F5 BIG-LTM is getting trained through professional trainers and instructors. One can purchase the recorded sessions or enroll in live group batches or one-to-one batch. Some institutes even provide virtual labs to deliver the hands-on experience and train the candidate with real troubleshooting.
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Recommended command over following concepts
Although to appear in the exam, one needs complete knowledge of the objectives. But there are some basics that need to be known even before joining the training courses. However, some institutes even start from scratch, but it is recommended to have the following knowledge.
- Ethernet & ARP
- OSI model encapsulation
- Routing and switching
- LAN
- WAN
- NAT and private IP addressing
- Default gateway
- IP addressing & subnetting
- TCP/IP
- Network firewalls
These are some of those basic concepts that are expected to be known by the candidate who is looking to enroll in the F5 BIG-LTM training course or starting with the self-study method.
These are some of the information and details related to the BIG-IP LTM certification which needs to be known by anyone who is thinking to acquire the certification of BIG-IP LTM.