boo_radley_1114
Apr 11, 2011Nimbostratus
new to F5 - basic understanding of VLAN and config
Hi folks -- I just inherited an F5 LTM (6900) that is being used in a test lab, and would love to ask a couple of very general and "newbie"ish questions on the configuration if I might?
First, for my general understanding -- in *all* cases does traffic from the servers balanced by the F5 return back through the F5 to avoid the 'asymetric routing' issue? Or in some cases can this be configured differently?
Anyway, all of our test traffic is on a private, physically separate LAN with an ip address schema of 10.10.20.* and netmask 255.255.255.0. There is a second LAN, used for management, internet access, etc., but it's not involved with the F5 (except that the F5 managment port is on it). I have a single VLAN configured called "internal" using interface 1.1 (the only interface used), and a self-ip address. I have about ten different virtual servers being load balanced, and each is defined to use "SNAT AUTOMAP".
1) Would I gain an advantage by configuring an additional VLAN? In Chapter 5 of the BIG-IP Network and Managment Guide, if I read it correctly if I have a second VLAN group and it shares the 'same address space' (ie, same subnet?) I won't need SNAT. If I create a second VLAN group would I need to change my network addressing, and create a new subnet?
2) I'm concerned at overwhelming the single interface eventually. Currently I'm seeing peaks of around 200Mbps, but I would expect about 7x more traffic eventually. Would creating a second VLAN help me here -- eg., I could have client traffic coming in on 1 VLAN and port 1.1, and traffic to the back-end servers on port 1.2? (Utimately, I probably want to truck the interfaces, as well, but can't do that until I get more modern, managed switches). Thx!