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Neil_Clark_1561's avatar
Neil_Clark_1561
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
May 21, 2014

Physical Placement of F5 GTM

Hi,

 

I have been looking round for reference documents that depict some example deployment options for the F5 GTM for Load Balancing traffic between two data centers (Active/Active). I am particularly interested in where F5 recommend deploying the GTM, i.e. as a module hanging of the core, or on the WAN edge, inline, out of path?

 

Any one have any useful info they could share?

 

Thanks

 

Neil

 

availability
BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM)
BIG-IP DNS
cloud
design
security
vmware

1 Reply

  • Kevin_Stewart's avatar
    Kevin_Stewart
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    May 21, 2014

    A very common and useful GTM deployment is as separate (smaller) appliances near the edge. Here are 3 reasons why that's so:

     

    1. GTM is DNS, which is something that should logically is closer to the edge than the application proxy.

       

    2. GTM on the application proxy consumes an amount of resources that would be better used by the application proxy and like services.

       

    3. In a hardware HA environment, where you potentially have 4 devices across 2 sites, you would generally need 4 GTM licenses.