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Use of the S3 Ping operation is recommended in monitoring ECS S3 service port availability on ECS software running on dedicated ECS hardware. This operation is documented inside the Dell EMC ECS REST API Reference Guide which can be found at https://www.emc.com/techpubs/api/ecs/v3-0-0-0/index.htm.
The S3 Ping operation is dependent upon the fabric layer inside the ECS software. The fabric layer of the ECS software stack provides clustering and system health among other things. It is responsible for keeping required services up and running and managing resources such as disks, containers, and the network. It tracks and reacts to environmental changes such as failure detection and provides alerts related to system health. The S3 Ping operation uses the fabric layer to determine the state of the node’s maintenance mode. For additional information about the ECS fabric layer refer to the ECS Overview and Architecture whitepaper at http://www.emc.com/collateral/white-papers/h14071-ecs-architectural-guide-wp.pdf.
The ECS Community Edition is a virtual instance of the ECS software and as such has no underlying fabric layer. It is because of this that the example LTM S3 pool configurations provided in the main section of this paper use standard HTTP and HTTPs built-in monitors.
Figure 40 below shows the general properties section of a custom S3 monitor.
Figure 41 below shows the strings portion of the custom S3 monitor.
Note: Regarding the send string configured in the configuration section of the new monitor, ‘GET /?ping HTTP/1.1\nHost:f5\n\n’, the value of ‘f5’ that is associated with ‘Host’ is a dummy value. This dummy value is needed and is used for the GET all.
Figure 42 below shows the final part of the configuration section for the custom S3 monitor.
Note: User name and password are NOT required for the S3 Ping operation and configuration
Figure 43 below shows the custom S3 monitor created above in use as the health monitor for a pool of ECS nodes.
Figure 43 - LTM pool using custom S3 monitor