Four Active/Active load balancing examples with F5 BIG-IP and Azure Load Balancer

Multiple standalone devices, or cluster? Let's discuss what is possible and easily supportable in public cloud.

Background A couple years ago I wrote an article about some practical considerations using Azure Load Balancer. Over time it's been used by customers, so I thought to add a further article that spe...
Updated Jun 24, 2025
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MichaelOLeary's avatar
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I'm a Solution Architect at F5. Over the years I've become an expert in Kubernetes and cloud architectures. I publish articles and blog posts to share as much knowledge as possible. I love hanging out with customers and co-workers, so reach out any time!
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PowerRangers
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Jan 21, 2026

 

Hello Michael O’Leary, We are doing a similar deployment in Azure and want to use an active-active setup. We are planning to use Azure Load Balancer (ALB) to provide high availability by load-balancing traffic to the F5s. However, I have a few questions. If Azure Load Balancer is handling the HA, what happens to the F5 sync group and the VIP subnet? Will we still have a sync group so that all VIPs and configurations are synchronized? In that case, will both F5 devices have the same VIP IP, or should each appliance have a different VIP IP? The Self IPs would be different.