Forum Discussion
L4L7_53191
Nimbostratus
Dec 06, 2010One of the worst outages I've ever seen had to do with a network heartbeat VLAN between two DCs that was severed. The BigIPs were split, as were 10 or so other devices that rely on GARP for failover. They all did what they were configured to do: they went active and all started sending GARPs out to every VLAN. What's worse is that only the failover VLAN was taken down and all of the other vlans were still connected. The arp storm was quite a spectacle to behold!
My personal angle is that network FO is fine, but you need to know the ramifications very well and think out all of the failure scenarios and their behaviors. That way, you'll at least know what to expect outage wise and it'll shorten your recovery times substantially. When it bites, layer 2 is merciless...
-Matt