Forum Discussion
Ali26 Which SNAT were you reading about that stated it uses the floating IP of the F5? From my understanding the F5 uses the self-IP for SNAT automatically if you use the automap feature and not the floating IP so HA or standalone shouldn't matter because it always uses the self-IP. I don't ever recommend configuring SNAT with the self-IP or floating IP of your F5 for standalone or HA. I recommend configuring a SNAT pool with the virtual server IP of the virtual server in question in that SNAT pool. The reason for a SNAT pool with the virtual server IP is because when left alone using auto-map in a high connection environment you could technically exhaust all the ports for the self-IP and then things such as health checks would not function correctly and so you would use the virtual server IP instead in the SNAT pool.
Hi Ali26 ,
Floating IP is an objected related to DSC { Device service Clustering } or what we call it High availability , So there is no need to configure it without DSC or a standby box , and configure SNAT pool to have the varity of egress ips to forward your traffic.
I want to add something , if you have HA pair configures , definitely you will need the Floating ip addresses which they are shared between both of units { Active/standby } , and the Bigip prefers the Floating ips over self ips to forward egress traffic in case you used { SNAT >>> Automap }.I use floating IPs only, if I need routing entries pointing to the F5 cluster.
I always use SNAT-Pools and never Automap. SNAT-Pools are ways more flexible as automap.