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santsboy_145140's avatar
santsboy_145140
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Mar 15, 2014

LTM and ESX Cluster between DCs

Hi,

 

we have twin DCs (active/active) with only one ESX cluster between DCs. I was thinking of using the best practice design of having 1 GTM and 2 LTM in each DC.

 

My question is if we have only one ESX cluster in total (also between DCs), which is the benefit of LTM?

 

Why do we need to disable DRS? will LTM provide DRS capabilities and do vMotion when the VM has high CPU? Do I really need the LTMs?

 

With 1 ESX cluster, will GTM be able to load balance the traffic between DCs?

 

Thank you very much.

 

Regards,

 

JJBN

 

application delivery
BIG-IP DNS
cloud
deployment
design
LTM
vmware
  • Cory_50405's avatar
    Cory_50405
    Mar 15, 2014

    The LTM will afford you many more options and granularity for health check types to best determine health of pool members than GTM will. Your GTM will only be responsible for providing resolution for the FQDNs and directing traffic to the proper LTM. It'll be up to the LTM to determine which servers within your ESX environment to send traffic to. You could use just the GTMs to provide DNS resolution and load balancing, but you'd have fewer options.

     

  • Cory_50405's avatar
    Cory_50405
    Icon for Noctilucent rankNoctilucent
    Mar 15, 2014

    The LTM will afford you many more options and granularity for health check types to best determine health of pool members than GTM will. Your GTM will only be responsible for providing resolution for the FQDNs and directing traffic to the proper LTM. It'll be up to the LTM to determine which servers within your ESX environment to send traffic to. You could use just the GTMs to provide DNS resolution and load balancing, but you'd have fewer options.