BIGIP LTM Ver 9.4.5 Active/Standby Different Data Centres

Bare in mind if that heartbeat link fails, even for a few seconds you will have a far far bigger mess than you would have had with standalone units.

 

We had a switchboard failiure on one of the 6509's we were heatbeating over, it reset and recovered about 12 seconds later, but the damage was done, unit 1 and 2 were active and ARP didn't sort itself out, leaving traffic going into A, through the datacentre and back to B, which had no persistance enabled and dropped the traffic.

 

Mac masqurading might have helped, but we solved the problem with 2 trunked (Etherchannel in the cisco world) cat 6 cables between the units for heartbeat. (Originally the architects wanted only optical between racks to avoid it turning into spagetti junction)

 

 

Anyway, heatbeating over intermediate equiptment is asking for trouble and should be avoided at all costs!