F5 301B BIG-IP LTM study guide
F5 301B BIG-IP LTM · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The F5 301B BIG-IP LTM exam is the specialist-level certification test for administrators and engineers who build, tune, and troubleshoot Local Traffic Manager objects on a BIG-IP system. It is aimed at people with hands-on operational experience: you are expected to reason about how a virtual server, profile stack, pool, persistence setting, and monitor interact to produce the traffic behavior a user sees, rather than just recall where a checkbox lives. The F5 301B BIG-IP LTM study guide has 8 sections and about 3,394 words.
01BIG-IP LTM configuration and virtual servers
Domain 1 tests whether you can build a listener that actually passes traffic: the virtual server, its address and port, the profiles and pool attached to it, and the address translation that decides what the backend server sees. Most questions ask what a setting does at traffic time, not where the control lives in the UI.
490 words, about 2 min02Profiles and traffic processing
Domain 2 covers profiles: what each type does, how inheritance resolves, and the order in which BIG-IP processes a connection. Questions usually present a traffic symptom and ask which profile is missing or which setting changed behaviour.
429 words, about 2 min03Pools, nodes, and load balancing methods
Domain 3 covers nodes, pool members and the algorithms that choose one. The exam probes the difference between member-level and node-level metrics, the state model behind a green pool, and how ratio and priority interact.
418 words, about 2 min04Persistence and session management
Domain 4 tests persistence: which method fits which protocol, how records are created and expired, and how persistence interacts with load balancing, SNAT and member failure. Expect scenario questions about a user landing on a different server mid-session.
416 words, about 2 min05Monitors and health checking
Domain 5 covers health checking: how a monitor instance is scheduled, what makes it fail, and how its verdict rolls up into node, member and pool status. Questions often hinge on a member being marked down for a reason unrelated to application health.
406 words, about 2 min06SSL/TLS termination and client certificate handling
Domain 6 covers TLS termination and re-encryption on LTM, plus client certificate verification. The exam focuses on which profile does what, how certificate chains are built, and what a handshake failure alert number tells you.
429 words, about 2 min07iRules and traffic manipulation
Domain 7 covers iRules: event order, which commands are valid where, and how to route or rewrite traffic without breaking performance. Questions are usually short code snippets containing one wrong line.
388 words, about 2 min08Troubleshooting and monitoring LTM objects
Domain 8 covers diagnosis: where to look first, which tool shows which layer, and how to tell a monitor problem from a routing problem. Questions describe a symptom and ask what to check or what the output means.
418 words, about 2 min