Ok, last time I jumped straight in at the techie end of the pool, gushing about a useful tool for identifying problems on the network with your applications. It has been pointed out to me that I may have overlooked the major elements of our new release. I will go some way towards rectifying that, with this post.
The biggest change to the Zeus Traffic Manager (ZTM) is to actually extend it into a new product, the Multi-Site Manager (MSM to its friends). This license enabled upgrade, changes the whole perspective of managing Zeus products. Before this release, if you had multiple locations in which you had Zeus Traffic Manager deployed, you would have to manage each cluster as a separate entity, with no easy way to replicate (and control) configuration elements across these clusters. Enter MSM!
What the Multi-Site Manager does, is gather all those Zeus Traffic Managers (with the MSM product licence applied), into one management super-cluster, whilst at the same time retaining the ability to have different configuration elements applied on a location by location basis.
Sounds simple doesn’t it? For the administrator using the interface it is. I have been reliably informed by my colleagues in our development team there was a little bit of work in the background to make it this simple.
The most obvious change that Multi-Site Manager brings to the party is the concept of locations. These do not necessarily mean different geographical sites, but different Zeus Traffic Manager clusters. This could just as easily be a development/pre-production/production setup in one data centre, as different data centres in London/New York/Tokyo for example.
What this allows you to do is select where you want a specific configuration element to be active. So, you can turn a service on globally, or only enable it in one location. This is achieved in a rather neat and simple way. Below is a service configured to run globally:
Below it is now configured to only run in one of the available locations:
Simply clicking on the little globe icon, changes the context of the view, either global settings or individual location settings. This is a very simple way to implement a potentially complex piece of functionality. A hat tip goes to Matthew Horney who I believe is the Zeus developer mainly responsible for this feature.
The little globe icons appear wherever there is an element of configuration that can be location specific, which makes it extremely quick to roll out a new rule, for example. You can develop the rule on one location (possibly a dev cluster), then when it is ready, you just turn it on in all the locations you require it to run in.
By itself the Multi-Site Manager is a cool addition to the Zeus product family. However it gets much better when you combine it with a couple of the other v7.0 features which I will chat about in the next post.
Check in next week for Part 3.
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