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jfrizzell_43066's avatar
jfrizzell_43066
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Jan 18, 2012

LTM Connection to Dual Switches

Hello Everyone,   I am hoping that someone can help me understand which connection type is best for F5. We currently have two F5's in an active/failover cluster. In our environment, we are going a...
config
design
jfrizzell_43066's avatar
jfrizzell_43066
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Jan 20, 2012
So I posted the diagrams on bayimg and the links are below:

 

http://bayimg.com/KAMpmaada (Diagram-1)

 

http://bayimg.com/KamPnaADA (Diagram-2)

 

 

Techgeeeg - I setup the the switching and LTM's as shown in diagram-1, but had a an issue. As I described in the original post, the two switch ports connecting to LTM-01 & LTM-02 1.1 are configured as trunks worked great. To finish the configuration off, I had configured the remaining switch ports that connect to LTM-01 & LTM-02 1.2 as trunk ports and enabled them. The two switches correctly went through spanning-tree and placed ports as active/blocked. After enable all four ports, I made a connection to the website and the load time was 6 seconds. I disabled the two ports on the switch that lead to LTM-01 & LTM-02 1.2 and the load time was less than 1 second. I tried this a number times of disabled the two ports and adding it back, but the result was exactly the same, that being load delay. Any ideas on why this might be occurring?

 

 

I spoke with F5 support and the engineer told me to go with Diagram-2 and enable failsafe. Basically, the failsafe method checks to ensure that the VLAN is continuously passing traffic and if it doesn't, the F5 will failover. Additionally, he said the best method for failover detection was the serial cable.

 

 

At this point, I am struggling with which option I should take as I see valid arguments for both sides.