AltocumulusNSX-T and F5 HA using BGP
Hi All,
I am working on a lab to get F5 LTM VE high availability pair working with NSX-T T0 router using BGP
The routing domain all works find, I am able to establish the BGP neighborship and I see the T0 routes, and the T0 sees my routes.
What I am trying to find information on, is on what the best practice is for the Active/Standby F5 HA pair to be BGP paired to the Active/active T0.
As is, the NSX-T T0 router sees routes being advertised from both F5, even the standby unit. I ran into a problem where the Standby unit was receiving traffic as it was a valid route in the table of the NSX-T0 and to resolve the issue I created a BGP Floating self ip and configured it as the next-hop ip address for the NSX-T0. This way the active F5 always processes the traffic. I am wondering if this is the intended way to do such a design or if there is a better way to do this, a standardize way to do this. Here is an ASCII representation of the design:
+-------------------------------+
| |
| CAMPUS NETWORK |
| |
+-----+---------------------+---+
| |
eBGP eBGP
| |
+-----+---------------------+---+
| Active Active |
| +-----+ +-----+ |
| |EDGE1| NSX-T |EDGE2| |
| +-+---+ T0 +---+-+ |
| |.1 .2| |
+----+----------------------+---+
| |
| |
| |
eBGP eBGP
| |
| NEXT-HOP |
| FLOAT-IP |
|.3 .5 .4|
+-+--+ +---+-+
|F5-1+------HA-------+F5-2 |
+----+ +-----+
Active Passive
Hello,
This configuration is entirely supported and used at many service provider accounts, including my own.
For the BGP peers you will want to peer with the self-IP, not with the floating self-IP. This will indeed allow for two active peers and they will receive routes from both BIP-IP's. The way you control traffic is indeed with the floating self-IP, you just need to set the outbound (or inbound on the routers) next-hop as the floating self-IP using a quick route-map. Here is a quick example config:
router bgp xxxx
bgp log-neighbor-changes
bgp graceful-restart restart-time 120
neighbor x.x.x.x remote-as xxxxx
neighbor x.x.x.x description xxxxx
neighbor x.x.x.x route-map blue-to-bgp outroute-map blue-to-bgp permit 100
set metric 100
set ip next-hop x.x.x.x primary <--Floating Self-IP
