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newbieF5guy's avatar
newbieF5guy
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Oct 02, 2019

Zonerunner and Wide IP's

I am currently stumped with understanding the difference between Zonerunner and Wide IP's.

 

I understand that Zonerunner can maintain DNS records such as A,AAAA, CNAME ect and Wide IP's is simply a FQDN matched to an IP.

 

What I don't understand is how you can have a 'A' record Pool attached to a Wide IP and an A record in Zonerunner pointing to the same IP address - isn't this essentially two different configurations to achieve the same thing?

 

What's the go? Surely I am missing something.

3 Replies

  • Hi,

    From my little experience with the DNS module, Zone Runner provides DNS zone transfert what a simple wideIP can't do.

  • In short you are correct that they are both providing an ip address to queries for FQDNS within their configurations. However, the WideIP is looking at the health of the hosts that you have in WideIP's pool and has the ability to apply logic where Zonerunner(Bind) could care less and it will return the ip address it has on file. If there is more than one, it will round robin with out any logic.

     

    A Wideip can make decisions on which ip address to return to the clients based on topology, cpu, packet rate, number of hops and various other data it has on hand. This works best when the ip address being returned is a VIP from an F5 LTM, as then the GTM module can pull the status and other data about that VIP via iQuery to allow for a better decision to be made as to which ip address should be returned the client and what is in its WideIP pool.

     

    An example would be say you had a Widip with two ip address in its pool, one address is for the US datacenter LTM VIP and other address is for the Europe datacenter LTM VIP. When a dns request comes in , you could use topology records keying off countries to tell the wideip to only return the US VIP IP for clients requests from the US and the same for Europe based requests to only get the Europe VIP IP. Then if say the US VIP goes down, the Wideip see that status change and would return the Europe VIP IP for US clients as backup untill the US VIP comes back up.

     

    Or another way you could always have all clients get the US VIP ip address, but when it goes down they will get the Europe VIP ip address. All depends on how you configure the WideIP and GTM

    • newbieF5guy's avatar
      newbieF5guy
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      Hi Martin - Thats a really good answer! Just to clarify, When setting up DNS you can either set it up in GSLB (if you want the smarts of global load balancing) or you can dump it in zonerunner if you don't require GSLB.

       

      The difference being Zonerunner can do zone handoff and NS,SOA, MX records whereas GLSB cannot.

       

      Both Zonerunner and GSLB accomplish the ultimate goal of handing back a response to a DNS query however GSLB can do it intelligently.