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Forum Discussion

marsmann_58298's avatar
marsmann_58298
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Sep 30, 2008

Advantages and Disadvantages to trunk LTMs

Hi all,     First time poster. Relatively new to F5's. Did some searching but found nothing conclusive so far.     What are the advantages and/or disadvantages with using trunk...
config
design
dennypayne's avatar
dennypayne
Icon for Employee rankEmployee
Oct 01, 2008
The main 2 advantages of trunking are 1) you are more protected against cable/port failures, that is, you won't lose a whole VLAN if one of the cables fail, and 2) you are currently limited to 1GB of bandwidth on each VLAN, whereas if you trunk the interfaces you have the full amount of bandwidth of the trunk available for each VLAN (not all at once of course, the aggregate remains the same).

 

 

Be careful with multi-homed servers behind the LTM. If LTM is not their gateway then you will have to use SNAT for all of the virtual servers or the routing won't work. There's plenty of previous posts on the caveats for using SNAT, primarily you will lose visibility of client IP addresses in server logs.

 

 

Denny