Configure CSS for IMAP?

[pmoscicki]

Hello,

We are using the CSS 11154's in our infrastrucutre for load balancing web based services. We also have two MS Exchange front end servers that are currently serving up MS OWA (Outlook Web Access) http content. These are being sucessfully load balanced via the two CSS 11154's. Our email folks would like to include IMAP (POP, SMTP, etc.) as the email protocols options for our end users. How can I configure the CSS's to allow IMAP (for example) communications to our two Exchange servers? Can the CSS's load balance the IMAP traffic between these two servers like it is doing today with the http based OWA traffic?

[Gilles Dufour]

yes you can do this.

All these protocols use TCP.

IMAP uses port 143

SMTP uses port 25

....

So, you can either do 1 content rule to loadbalance all traffic (UDP/TCP) and you do not care about what it is.

Or you can have 1 content rule for only TCP traffic.

Finally, you could 1 content rule for each protocol you mentioned.

I don't think there is anything special to do.

example #1:

owner MyCompany

content MyServers

vip address x.x.x.x

add service s1

add service ...

active

!!! this is if you do a layer 3 rule. So, all traffic is loadbalanced

example #2:

owner MyCompany

content IMAP

vip address x.x.x.x

protocol tcp

port 143

add service ....

active

Hope this help.

Gille.s