F5CAB4 Exam Dumps - BIG-IP Administration Control Plane Administration (F5CAB4) exam

Managing the license is a primary Control Plane task required to activate software modules and features on a BIG-IP device.

License Management Utility: All actions related to the device license, including initial activation, renewal, and adding add-on keys, are performed under the System > License section of the Configuration Utility.

Procedural Requirements: Licensing often requires the generation of a "dossier," which is a unique encrypted string used by the F5 License Server to generate the final license file.

Impact on Services: Updating or re-activating a license generally requires a restart of system services (such as the tmm daemon), which will temporarily disrupt traffic processing unless performed on a standby unit in a high availability pair.

Add-on Licenses: If an administrator needs to increase the capacity of a specific module (like increasing the SSL TPS limit or adding a new module like ASM), the new registration keys are entered through this same interface using the "Re-activate" button.

The Statistics Dashboard is the primary graphical interface used by administrators to monitor the real-time performance and health of the BIG-IP system.

System-Wide Overview: Navigating to Statistics > Dashboard provides a centralized view of critical system-level metrics, including global CPU utilization (across all TMM instances and the Linux host) and total memory usage.

Performance Tracking: In addition to CPU and memory, the dashboard displays other vital statistics such as total active connections, throughput (bits/packets per second), SSL transactions per second (TPS), and compression efficiency.

Operational Health: Monitoring these metrics from the dashboard allows the administrator to quickly identify performance trends or resource exhaustion that could impact the Control Plane or Data Plane stability.

Comparison to Other Menus:

Local Traffic > Virtual Servers: Provides statistics specific to traffic objects rather than global system resources.

Network > Interfaces: Shows physical layer statistics like link status, errors, and drops for specific ports.

Device Management > Overview: Focuses on high availability (HA) states, synchronization status, and device trust rather than granular performance metrics.

Management access security is a primary Control Plane configuration task3.

Management Interface Security: The BIG-IP system provides a dedicated management port that is separate from the TMM (Traffic Management Microkernel) data interfaces4444.

System Platform Settings: Under the System > Platform section of the Configuration Utility, an administrator can define specific IP addresses or subnets that are permitted to access the device via SSH or HTTPS (the GUI).

Port Lockdown Difference: While "Port Lockdown" settings under Network > Self IPs control access to the device through self-IP addresses on data VLANs, they do not manage the security of the dedicated management port .

Access Control Lists: For robust security, F5 recommends using the "IP Allow" or "httpd Allow" lists found in the platform settings to prevent malicious brute-force attempts or unauthorized access from non-management networks .

Management connectivity is protected by an allowed access list for the httpd daemon. Unlike TMM data ports which use 'Port Lockdown' settings, the management port's access is controlled by a specific 'Allow' list. If an administrator's IP is not explicitly included in this list, the Control Plane will reject HTTPS connection attempts to the management utility.