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alex100
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Feb 23, 2022

Big-IP Layer 2 networking in OCI (Oracle Cloud)

HI Devcentral,

I am working on POC in Oracle cloud. So I am deploying an HA pair of VEs based on F5 doc.  No issues there following documentation. Learning all the nonsense about the requirement to move virtual server IPs from vnic on active to standby via API call. Also, I came across OCI documentation for L2 support My POC environment has VLAN feature available so I was able implement external network as a L2 VLAN. In this case no API calls are needed to move failover objects (virtual servers) form active to standby as Big-IP handles it natively. Aslo, with virtuals on L2 network, failover is some much quciker, virtually seamless in conrast with L3 taking up to 15 seconds for traffic flow to restore. When I reached out to Oracle for clarification I am getting sketchy responses that L2 as  feature is not fully supported and I should not be using it. This sounds strange to me. Has anybody successfully implemented L2 networking in OCI with Big-IPs? Are there any under water rocks with L2? Please, share your experience if possible. Tanks in advance.

1 Reply

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    Hello Alex100.

    All the cloud solutions (AWS, Azure, OCI, ...) are built using SDN, so OSI layers are not perfectly equivalent to typical network infrastructure. For example, ARP protocol doesn't exist in AWS, so configuring the cluster requires installing some extra add-ons.

    For this reason, L2 is not fully supported in the majority of cloud solutions.

    I recommend you configure the cluster following this procedure:

    https://clouddocs.f5.com/cloud/public/v1/oracle/oracle_deploy.html#oci-ha