Forum Discussion

Adrien_Legros_1's avatar
Adrien_Legros_1
Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
Dec 11, 2008

Keep Source IP & BIgIP as Default gateway

Hello,     I'd like to keep the source IP of my client behind the BigIP. F5 told me that I should define the BigIP as the default gateway for our servers. But which IP should be the defaul...
config
design
James_Quinby_46's avatar
James_Quinby_46
Historic F5 Account
Dec 12, 2008
A typical method is to use the LTM's self IP as the gateway address. If you have an HA pair, use the float IP so that it's always available to your back-end servers.

 

 

If your network topology requires the use of a SNAT, you can preserve (for HTTP apps, in any case) client source IP via the "X-Forwarded-For" header.

 

 

Using the BigIP as a gateway ('routed' mode) is how most folks tend to deploy in production. For testing and evaluation purposes, a SNAT'ed deployment ('one-armed' mode) is used because it's the least intrusive to the environment. Using routed mode will require you to change the default GW of any hosts that reside 'behind' the BigIP.