Applies To:
Show VersionsBIG-IP PEM
- 11.6.5, 11.6.4, 11.6.3, 11.6.2, 11.6.1
Configuring Intelligent Traffic Steering
Overview: Configuring intelligent traffic steering
You can use the Policy Enforcement Manager™ to set up the BIG-IP® system to classify and intelligently steer traffic on the network. The system automatically sets up virtual servers for TCP and UDP traffic so that the BIG-IP system can classify the traffic and direct it to one or more steering endpoints based on traffic characteristics.
Task Summary
What is traffic steering?
Policy Enforcement Manager™ provides the ability to intelligently steer traffic based on policy decision made using classification criteria, URL category, flow information, or custom criteria (iRule events). Steering, also called traffic forwarding, can help you police, control and optimize traffic.
You can forward a particular type of traffic to a pool of one or more servers designed to handle that type of traffic, or to a location closer to clients requesting a service. For example, you can send HTTP video traffic to a pool of video delivery optimization servers. You can have one policy option to classify each transaction which allows transaction aware steering. The ability to classify traffic for every transaction is called transactional policy enforcement. The classification per transaction is for HTTP traffic only.
You set up steering by creating an enforcement policy that defines the traffic that you want to send to a particular location or endpoint. Rules in the enforcement policy specify conditions that the traffic must match, and actions for what to do with that traffic. One of the actions you can take is to forward the traffic to a particular endpoint, called a forwarding endpoint.
You can create listeners to set up virtual servers and associate the enforcement policies with the traffic that is sent to them. The system also creates a Policy Enforcement profile that specifies the enforcement policy that the system uses, among other uses, for traffic steering.