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Martyfish's avatar
Martyfish
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Jun 15, 2022

BGP setup triggering Broadcast Storm to Activate

Hi All,

I have opened case case with support, but have not gotten an answer. So I want to see if anyone can point me in the right direction.

We set up BGP on a i4000 LTM running 14.1.4 for a DRaaS setup. After the BGP was activated, our hosting noticed that we were setting off Broadcast storm control on the upstream BGP switch due to broadcast bursts.  This never happened before BGP. This is a HA pair.

We are not experiancing any other issues.

I see a lot of ARP reqests going out over the external VLAN:

4:03:58.336952 ARP, Request who-has xxx.xxx.xxx.169 tell xxx.xxx.xxx.149, length 48 out slot1/tmm0 lis=
4:03:58.392623 ARP, Request who-has xxx.xxx.xxx.164 tell xxx.xxxx.xx.149, length 48 out slot1/tmm1 lis=

xxx.169 and 164 are virtual servers, xxx.149 is self ip of external vlan. All on the same subnet.

show net arp | grep incomplete is showing a lot of the following:

xxx.xxx.xxx.167 xxx.xxx.xxx.167 incomplete /Common/Vlan1 0 unknown

I presume this is because the gateway is the BGP neighbor. Support had me set up Route health injection according to the following:

https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K15923612

Other than the intermittant broadcast issue everything is working fine, including the BGP. My hosting is going to revert the BGP back if we don't figure this out before Saturday. 

  • Martyfish - I see nobody has responded to your question. (and I also see you had a sense of urgency).
    Can you confirm for me whether this is still an issue?

    If so - I'll try to get someone who knows about BGP to lend a hand.

    Thanks for being part of our community.
    Lief