F5 HA deployment in Azure using Azure Load Balancer

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I just created an HA 90 (Active/Standby) peer for one of our customers adding an F5 to their current stand alone infrastructure in Azure. We are using a 3-NIC deployment model using the external interface for the VIPs and the Internal for our HA peering. We are also using secondary IP addresses on the external NIC which are in turn used for the VIPs on the F5.

:check_mark: 3-NIC BIG-IP deployment (Management, Internal, External)
:check_mark: Secondary IPs on the external NIC
:check_mark: Those secondary IPs are mapped to BIG-IP Virtual Servers (VIPs)
:check_mark: Internal NIC is used only for HA sync (not for traffic)

For redundancy I have suggested using CFE in for failover but the customer wants to use and Azure load balancer and having the F5s as backend pool members. They do not want to use CFE.

Is it possible to deploy an F5 HA pair in Azure using an Azure Load Balancer while the VIPs are using secondary NICs on the external interface? I’m afraid using an ALB would require making changes to the current VIP configurations on F5 to support a wildcard.

Any other HA deployment models within Azure given the current infrastructure would also be helpful.

Thank You

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hi @bmainline

you definetely can use ALB instead of CFE

you will need to unassign secondary ips from NICs and assign them to ALB

on ALB you should also enable floating IP so you can use same IPs as VIPs

check this Lightboard Lessons: BIG-IP Deployments in Azure Cloud | DevCentral

especially “HA Using ALB for Failover with DSR Enabled (Floating IP)” part

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In my experience better use Microsoft LB not CFE as the Azure’s API synchronization between failovers can take minutes while in AWS as the AWS API is faster CFE can resign the public IP address in seconds. So the issues come from Azure API slowness in general.