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Forum Discussion

Michael_Ozorows's avatar
Michael_Ozorows
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Apr 10, 2017

IS GTM the way to go?

Hello,   We have a large F5 deployment, and I inherited this project. Working to learn my way around F5.   That said, I have a request to create 2 VIP's. Easy. But they want 1 VIP per data cen...
application delivery
BIG-IP
LTM
Kevin_K_51432's avatar
Kevin_K_51432
Historic F5 Account
Apr 10, 2017

Greetings, This sounds very much like something GTM (now DNS) could handle. DNS' specialty is steering traffic by resolving DNS queries using a Wide-IP.

Wide-IPs are made up of pools that are made up of virtual servers. Wide-IPs also use load balancing algorithms to determine which pool to use.

So, in the case you describe, it sounds like your VIP failover configuration might resemble:

        Wide-IP (www.example.com)
        |  |
        |  |
        +--+----Pool_1 = 1.1.1.1 (data center 1)
           |
           +------------Pool_2 = 2.2.2.2 (data center 2)

You would select global availability as the wide-ip load balancing algorithm which essentially says; hand out IP addresses (1.1.1.1) from Pool_1, until it becomes unavailable, then use Pool_2 IP address (2.2.2.2).

DNS also has topology based load balancing, so, hand out IP 1.1.1.1 if a query comes from this 10.10.10.1 and 2.2.2.2 if a query comes from 20.20.20.2.

Here's a very good introduction on the topic:

https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip-dns/manuals/product/bigip-dns-load-balancing-12-1-0/1.html