clients and servers are on the same network

Hi folks,

 

We have a load balancing scenario where the Client(10.10.10.10) and nodes (10.10.10.20 and 10.10.10.30) in the same network 10.10.10.0/24. Where the VIP is 20.20.20.20. I am using snat automap with the self ip as 10.10.10.5.

 

When the client initiates the connection to the vip I am seeing the traffic is hitting f5 in the tcpdump, also I am seeing the backend connection from the f5 self ip (10.10.10.5) to one of the nodes(say 10.10.10.20) and finally from the node(10.10.10.20) to the f5 self ip(10.10.10.5) which is perfectly fine.

 

Then I am also seeing some thing strange in the capture where the self ip (10.10.10.5) is directly talking to the client(10.10.10.10). This makes the connection from client unsuccessful all the time. Why is the self ip is trying to talk to client directly? as the client should get the response back from vip instead of self ip.

 

Any suggestions for this asymmetric packet flow. I have tried with snat pool with the ip in same subnet still the issue remains same. Am I missing any thing?

 

Thanks