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FFive's avatar
FFive
Icon for Altocumulus rankAltocumulus
May 20, 2022

NSX-T and F5 HA using BGP

Hi All, I am working on a lab to get F5 LTM VE high availability pair working with NSX-T T0 router using BGP The routing domain all works find, I am able to establish the BGP neighborship and I see...
application delivery
bgp
ha
high-availability
  • Frederick_Witte's avatar
    Frederick_Witte
    May 25, 2022

    Hello,

    This configuration is entirely supported and used at many service provider accounts, including my own.

    For the BGP peers you will want to peer with the self-IP, not with the floating self-IP.  This will indeed allow for two active peers and they will receive routes from both BIP-IP's.  The way you control traffic is indeed with the floating self-IP, you just need to set the outbound (or inbound on the routers) next-hop as the floating self-IP using a quick route-map.  Here is a quick example config:

    router bgp xxxx
    bgp log-neighbor-changes
    bgp graceful-restart restart-time 120
    neighbor x.x.x.x remote-as xxxxx
    neighbor x.x.x.x description xxxxx
    neighbor x.x.x.x route-map blue-to-bgp out

    route-map blue-to-bgp permit 100
    set metric 100
    set ip next-hop x.x.x.x primary <--Floating Self-IP

     

Brandon_'s avatar
Brandon_
Icon for Employee rankEmployee
May 25, 2022

F5's BGP implementation relies on kernel routes for Active/Standby configuration. You need to redistribute the kernel routes to be advertised in to BGP. This covers Virtual Addresses, SNATs, etc that you can assign to a floating traffic-group.

The kernel routes will only be available on the Active device and thereby only advertised from that device. The difference with a floating self-IP and a non floating self-IP is:

If no floating self-IP is defined, the next-hop address will be the active device's local Self-IP. This will change in the event of a failover.

If a floating self-IP is defined, the next-hop address will be that of the floating Self-IP and won't change in a failover.

If you are originating routes yourself by redistributing static routes defined on the BIG-IP those are not failover objects and both devices will advertise.

This lab we did a couple years ago walks through some of these details.

https://clouddocs.f5.com/training/community/adc/html/class5/module1/module1.html