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krishna_52364's avatar
krishna_52364
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Oct 24, 2011

Difference between BIGIP-LTM and BIG-IP GTM

All,     I am new to F5 Load balancing GTM and LTM. I would like to know the difference between LTM and GTM and what they serve for?     Thanks    
basic
getting started
new to f5
Chris_Miller's avatar
Chris_Miller
Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
Nov 05, 2011
LTM load balances servers and also does caching, compression, persistence, etc. GTM load balances data centers.

 

 

In a typical deployment, a customer will have 2 data centers, each with GTM and LTM devices. For GTM to work properly, customers delegate DNS resolution to GTM.

 

 

So, a user could type into their browser "www.example.com." GTM would see the DNS request and see which data center was performing best. If it was data center 1, GTM would return the IP address from the LTM in data center 1. Then, the user would connect to that IP and LTM would load balance the user's request to a server.