F5F5 Certified Administrator, BIG-IP (F5-CA, BIG-IP)
The F5 BIG-IP Administration Data Plane Concepts certification validates your ability to perform day-to-day operations and basic deployment, management, and support of BIG-IP in various application environments. It is designed for administrators who understand the relationship between interfaces, trunks, VLANs, self-IPs, and routes, and can determine expected traffic behavior based on configuration. Earning this credential demonstrates your competence in BIG-IP administration for both data plane and control plane, a key step in the F5 Certified Administrator, BIG-IP (F5-CA) progressive certification path.
347 practice questions · Updated 2026-07-30
F5CAB2 Curriculum
Every domain, objective, and concept the F5CAB2 exam measures.
- Trunk definition and purpose
- Trunk configuration components
- Trunk and VLAN association
- Trunk status and statistics monitoring
- Trunk failover and redundancy behavior
- VLAN-to-interface assignment
- VLAN-to-trunk assignment
- Untagged and tagged VLAN membership
- VLAN tagging on trunks
- Verification of VLAN assignments
- Traffic Flow Analysis
- VLAN Selection Criteria
- Route Selection Process
- Egress IP Determination
- Interface and Trunk Role
- Status and Statistics Interpretation
- Definition of tagged and untagged VLANs
- IEEE 802.1Q tagging mechanism
- Tagged vs untagged traffic behavior
- Native VLAN concept
- Configuration implications on F5 BIG-IP
- Interface status Up/Down
- Dependencies of interfaces on trunks
- Dependencies of trunks on interfaces
- Dependencies of VLANs on interfaces/trunks
- Dependencies of self-IPs on VLANs
- Dependencies of routes on self-IPs
- Status and statistics of interfaces/trunks
- Status and statistics of VLANs
- Status and statistics of self-IPs
- Status and statistics of routes
- Load balancing definition
- Intelligent load balancing
- Server selection methods
- Load balancing algorithms
- Health monitoring in load balancing
- ADC Definition
- Load Balancing
- Health Monitoring
- SSL Offloading
- Caching
- Compression
- Traffic Shaping and Prioritization
- Application Security
- Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB)
- Session Persistence
- Definition of ADC
- Core ADC Functions
- Benefits of Load Balancing
- High Availability and Failover
- Application Acceleration
- Security Enhancements
- Centralized Management
- Operational Efficiency
- Persistence Overview
- Persistence vs Load Balancing
- Persistence Record Creation
- Persistence Record Lookup
- Persistence Record Expiry
- Persistence Types
- Persistence and Virtual Servers
- Persistence and Pool Members
- Persistence and Fallback
- Persistence and New Sessions
- Wildcard VIP definition
- Packet processing order
- Virtual server matching precedence
- Wildcard VIP traffic behavior
- Interaction with other virtual servers
- Impact of wildcard VIP on forwarding
- Virtual Server Status
- Pool Status
- Pool Member Status
- Status Propagation
- Traffic Diversion Scenarios
- SNAT and egress source IP
- SNAT automap
- SNAT pool
- SNAT listener
- No SNAT
- SNAT and route domain
- SNAT and virtual server configuration
- Egress source IP for self-IP traffic
- Connection limit configuration
- Rate limit configuration
- Traffic behavior at connection limit
- Traffic behavior at rate limit
- Monitoring and logging of limit events
- Standard virtual server
- Forwarding virtual server
- Stateless virtual server
- Reject virtual server
- Comparison of virtual server types
- Performance (Layer 4) virtual server characteristics
- Performance (HTTP) virtual server characteristics
- Comparison of Performance (Layer 4) and Performance (HTTP)
- Failover integrity mechanisms
- Connection mirroring
- Persistence mirroring
- Stateful failover
- Configuration synchronization
- Failover triggers and detection
- Active/Standby HA
- Active/Active HA
- Connection and State Mirroring
- Failover Triggers
- Configuration Synchronization
- Floating IP Addresses
- Health Monitoring in HA
- Definition of High Availability
- Benefits of HA
- HA and Business Continuity
- HA vs. Redundancy
Percentages reflect share of the current practice bank, not official exam weightings — no structured per-skill weight is published for F5CAB2, so none is invented.