Section 5. Application Delivery Platforms

Objective 5.01 Describe the purpose, advantages, use cases, and challenges associated with hardware based application delivery platforms and virtual machines.

- Explain when a hardware based application deliver platform solution is appropriate
- Explain when a virtual machine solution is appropriate
- Explain the purpose, advantages, and challenges associated with hardware based application deliver platform solutions
- Explain the purpose, advantages, and challenges associated with virtual machines
- Given a list of environments/situations, determine which is appropriate for a virtual machine solution
- Explain the advantages of dedicated hardware (SSL card, compression card)
                                   
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Objective 5.02 Describe the purpose of the various types of advanced acceleration techniques.

- Describe the purpose of TCP optimization
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   "TCP OPTIMIZATION: utilizes F5 stack to maximize throughput on high latency WANs

BIG-IP WOM uses adaptive TCP optimizations to maximize throughput on high latency networks and improve performance across high loss links.  

F5 TCP optimizations are able to adapt, in real time, to the latency, packet loss, and congestion characteristics of WAN links, to fully utilize available bandwidth and accelerate application traffic.  

The highly optimized F5 TCP/IP stack optimizes delivery based on WAN conditions by applying session-level application awareness and persistent connections; selective acknowledgment and error corrections; and dynamically managing TCP window sizes. 

With TCP Optimization, F5 can help manage the congestion and other inefficiencies associated with TCP protocol." (F5 Technical Sales Accreditation, WOM Video)

- Describe the purpose of HTTP keepalives

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- Describe the purpose of Caching

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- Describe the purpose of Compression
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  "SYMMETRIC ADAPTIVE COMPRESSION: dynamically selects the appropriate compression algorithm to reduce the amount  of data sent across the WAN.

Symmetric Adaptive Compression ensures the optimal data reduction for any traffic between BIG-IP systems.  It reduces the number of bytes sent across the WAN. 

The way WOM "adapts" to the type of data sent and network conditions and link type is unique to F5.  By automatically selecting the appropriate compression algorithms, including not doing compression at all, customers can maximize bandwidth usage and throughput.  

In addition, Symmetric Adaptive Compression can be offloaded to dedicated BIG-IP compression hardware on select platforms to provide maximum performance.  " (F5 Technical Sales Accreditation, WOM Video)

- Describe the purpose of pipelining
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