The Virtual Traffic Manager Control API

This chapter provides a brief overview of the Virtual Traffic Manager SOAP-based Control API. For further information, please refer to the Virtual Traffic Manager: Control API Guide included with your distribution.

For information regarding the Virtual Traffic Manager REST API, see inst

Introducing the Virtual Traffic Manager Control API

The Virtual Traffic Manager Control API is not available on all Virtual Traffic Manager product variants. Refer to your product specifications for full details.

The Virtual Traffic Manager Control API is a standards-conformant SOAP API that can be used to remotely administer and configure a Virtual Traffic Manager cluster. The Control API provides an alternative to the Web-based Admin UI and is suitable if you want to configure the Virtual Traffic Manager from another application.

For example, if an Intrusion Detection System detected a remote attack attempt, it could use the Virtual Traffic Manager Control API to configure the Virtual Traffic Manager cluster to drop all connections from the suspect IP address.

A provisioning system could detect server overloading by monitoring the response times of the server nodes using the Virtual Traffic Manager’s Service Level Monitoring capability and the SNMP interface. After it had provisioned additional servers, it could then inform the Virtual Traffic Manager by reconfiguring the server pools using the Virtual Traffic Manager Control API.

The Virtual Traffic Manager Control API can be used by any programming language and application environment that supports SOAP services. Perl, Python, Java, and C# are commonly used.

Control API communication uses the Virtual Traffic Manager’s Admin Server port (by default, 9090). In some cases, your Admin Server might be running on an alternative port number. In the examples that follow, substitute references to port 9090 as appropriate. For more information on the Virtual Traffic Manager’s network port requirements, see Default Ports Used by the Virtual Traffic Manager.