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Basavaraj's avatar
Basavaraj
Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
Sep 08, 2020

i2600 hardwired serial fail-over cable

Hi Team,

 

Just wanted to get some clarification on the F5 i2600 hardwired serial cable, there is a RJ45 port on the F5 box and it is labled as a serial port. there is also blue cable came along with that, as per the documentation and all this blue should be used as fail-over cable between the F5 Box. Our F5 Box are mounted on two different racks and this cable is not enough to connect between them, as per the F5 document we can crimp the cable as per the color coding.

 

My question is can we use cat6 cable instead of cat5 cable for hardwired serial fail-over ? in all the documents of F5 mentioned only CAT5 but can it also work with CAT6 cable ?

 

Thank you

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  • ecce's avatar
    ecce
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Sep 09, 2020

    As far as I know the failover cable has a special pinout. As long as the CAT6 cable you use has the correct internal wiring I don't see any issue, but making your own network cables is to me a big no-no. It's not easy to achieve the same level of quality as the cables you buy. Hardware failover is just a voltage "sent" though the cable and if the voltage drops it triggers a failover, you don't have to wait for missing UDP packets. BUT, there are restrictions, like maximum length of 15 meters and it has to be a direct connection. Also, Hardware failover is rarely needed, network failover is easily fast enough for all installations I have done so far. Are you sure you really need it?

     

    Check out https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K1426

  • Basavaraj's avatar
    Basavaraj
    Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
    Sep 09, 2020

    Hi ECCE,

     

    Thanks for your response

     

    we have already done the network fail-over in addition to that i want to do hardwired serial fail-over as well, that's why i was looking if i use cat6 will it work or not.

     

    Thanks again for your suggestions and i will check out if CAT6 works

     

    Thank you