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Willian_Guilher's avatar
Willian_Guilher
Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
Apr 06, 2015

Traffic-Group Behaviour

I have been testing traffic-group on my vLabs and I still do not quite understand the behaviour during failover times. The vLab I am working on has the following configuration:

 

  • BIGIP_A - Traffic-Group-A

  • BIGIP_A - Traffic-Group-B

     

  • BIGIP_B - Traffic-Group-C

     

  • BIGIP_B - Traffic-Group-D

This configuration makes both devices become an Active-Active pair, which is fine. I expected that. I have added virtual addresses objects on all traffic-groups for testing purposes and enabled SNAT auto-map as well. The question I have is regarding the failover between them. When I simply unplug the network cable, the traffic-groups are not floating to the other device; however, if I power the device off, the traffic-group floats right away. The only situation, which I managed to make the traffic-group to failover after unplugging the network cable is by enabling the VLAN-Failsafe feature, which then automatically failover the traffic group to the other device.

 

Can someone explain the reason for such behaviour or if it is just he way it supposed to be?

 

Thanks

 

application delivery
high-availability
LTM
traffic-group
  • gsharri's avatar
    gsharri
    Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
    Apr 06, 2015

    Yes this is normal behavior. I assume that by "network cable" you mean a vlan interface cable. BIG-IP will not failover by default upon loosing an interface connection. As you discovered, this is what vlan-failsafe is for. In addition you can setup gateway-failsafe so that if BIG-IP looses contact with its gateway it will failover. Also there is a feature called "HA groups" (or fast failover. See: Managing Failover) which will initiate a failover event related to trunk, pool, or cluster health.