GTM VS DNS server

Greetings,

A few of the outstanding benefits would be the ability to actually monitor and load balance the IP addresses being resolved. A few examples:

• Availability: If you hand out IP address 1.1.1.1 for example.com and GTM determines that service is no longer available (network interruption), a backup address for an available service, say 2.2.2.2 can be chosen and handed out.

• Load balancing: Hand out 1.1.1.1 and 2.2.2.2 evenly, or 2.2.2.2 twice as often as 1.1.1.1 if the servers are different platforms / capacities. Hand out 1.1.1.1 to customers in Japan and 2.2.2.2 to customers in America.

   

• DDoS protection: GTM (F5 TMOS) offers advanced DDoS protection.

   

• DNSSEC: Easier DNSSEC management abilities.

This is a great intro article:

https://f5.com/products/big-ip/big-ip-dns

Hope this is helpful!

We use Global Availability in our environment for any domains that are used for Disaster Recovery. Our GTMs can determine availability of LTM objects and should everything go offline in our primary data center, we can direct traffic to our alternate data center.

Complementing what Kevin wrote, with BIG-IP DNS you have the same benefits of the traditional DNS and much more in terms of availability, performance, security and management capabilities:

Traditional DNS (BIND & Microsoft DNS):

• Do not offers GSLB capabilities.
• Do not offers true high availability. (There's no monitors)
• They only have a limited possibility of static load balancing. (Ex. Round Robin).
• You could have potential errors when editing DNS files using BIND, without validation.
• Performance is slower, because the resolution process tipically is done reading your records from the HDD.

F5 BIG-IP DNS:

• Offer Full GSLB capabilities.
• Offer True High Availability (HA). You could monitor every resource in every Data Center and only resolve to working addresses.
• You have static and dynamic load balancing capabilities in order to resolve to best of available addresses (Ex. QoS, Topology, Least Connection LB methods).
• There's a great tool (Zonerunner) for editing address records, that validates your input.
• Performance is faster, because the resolution process tipically is done reading your records from the RAM (DNS Express).
• DDoS protection.
• Easier configuration for DNSSEC (All-in-One).
• F5 Analytics visibility that provide information about your resolutions. (Top Countries, Top domains, etc.)