In case you have not been paying attention to the press releases, VMware Identity Manager is the platform that extends your on-premises directory infrastructure to provide a seamless single-sign-on (SSO) experience to web, mobile, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and legacy applications. Identity Manager is a service aggregator and identity provider for your IT resources.
A single login to Identity Manager gains your users access to: View desktops in VMware Horizon 7, Horizon-hosted applications, Citrix desktops and applications, web applications, SaaS applications and VMware ThinApp packaged applications, with VMware AirWatch to help manage mobile applications and resources through the VMware Workspace ONE solution.
The F5 BIG-IP appliance can provide intelligent traffic management, high availability and monitoring through the use of BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and BIG-IP DNS (formerly BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager). The F5 BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) can also provide secure access to apps and resources accessible through the Identity Manager portal, as well as to the actual Identity Manager portal itself.
VMware has worked with F5 to create the Load-Balancing VMware Workspace Portal / Identity Manager white paper to help you securely load balance Workspace ONE and, by extension, Identity Manager. In this white paper, we focus on building a highly available Identity Manager implementation using the F5 BIG-IP LTM solution.
A very cool option instead of reading the white paper is to do a walk-through of this exact setup in the F5 Integration with VMware Hands-On Labs (HOL). Do not forget to also try other labs in the HOL portal because they are all free!
Special thanks to Matt Mabis, Chris Betz and Bryan Salek of VMware, and to Justin Venezia of F5 for helping to create the HOL, and to Justin Venezia for putting together the procedure!
By Dean Flaming, EUC Architect, VMware End-User-Computing Technical-Marketing Center of Excellence
