F5 LTM VIP/STP Problem

Posted By jfrizzell on 04/01/2011 03:54 PM

 

Just received word from F5 support that HP NIC teams that consist of TLB and SLB are not supported by F5 LTM. Also, it looks as if the Cisco switches are doing their job by blocking the ports connected to the second switch. Although it seems a bit weird that this would occur with the LTMs in pass through mode, but I guess the Cisco switch sees it differently. I will team the NICs using Network Fault Tolerance and this should solve my issue with access to the VIPs.

 

 

If anyone has any other suggestions or believes otherwise, please let me know. Thank you to all that have helped with this issue thus far.

 

 

Ah... Not sure the F5 will care whether the HP NIC's are doing TLB/SLB or anything else. That's purely between the host and the switches. The F5 just sees an IP address, and (If they're on the same VLAN) a MAC address. Anything else (OK. MTU as well) is irrelevant.

 

 

On the port blocking. If you're re-sending traffic down one link fine an other, then the switch is doing it's job BECAUSE you're in pass-though mode. In this mode, the F5 re-sends the BPDU (SPanning Tree) packets back to the switch. So the switch knows that you've looped the traffic back on itself. Therefore it blocks one of the links, because otherwise you get broadcast storms as broadcast packets loop around & around...

 

 

 

I think you just have (Had? If it's now working) a problem with HP NIC teaming (Because it's not really good with multiple switches), and trying to aggregate links without using signalling.

 

 

 

I'm still a bit suspicious about the early statement that you couldn't resolve addresses with the previous config... But you don't mention where your client and DNS servers were... So that may simply be lack of info.

 

 

H