A virtual server without a pool member gives wrong answers for the records in the Wide IP list.

Hi,

This is the expected behavior of dns suffixes.

If the user dns record does not end with dot which means root dns, the dns lookup system will try first with all configured dns suffixes before trying root dns suffix.

When you say you add a pool to virtual server, which vs are you talking about? The dns listener?

If you don’t assign a pool to dns listener virtual server, and no wideIp matches, the dns request is sent to the local bind server which answer with nxdomain.

If there is a listener assigned pool, the dns request is sent to the pool member. If it’s not a dns server, it won’t answer a valid dns response, bigip will drop it, so the nslookup won’t send following request with other suffixes.