Adding Additional NIC to LTM VE

It's a terminology issue.

 

In F5 land a trunk is an LACP aggregation group, these don't work in VE, so unconfigure any 'trunks' you have built in VE.

 

Within the VE you just have to add the VLAN's to the tagged interfaces and you should be in business.

 

OK, that doesn't work either. If I attempt to create a VLAN, assign it a VLAN ID and then add all three interfaces to the "tagged" column, it tells me that only one interface can be assigned to a VLAN.

 

 

I'm starting to think that the VE version can't support trunking at all, no matter how you set it up. That's disappointing because if the interface that the VLAN is assigned to goes down for any reason, there's no failover.

 

 

Of course, on the other side, because it's only a virtual NIC and that virtual NIC is actually routed over multiple physical NICs, perhaps it really isn't as big of a problem.

Yes that's how it's supposed to be. As you point out the physical redundancy is taken care of by the host, that's why there's no need/point to running LACP inside the VM.

 

So if you just tag everything on one interface you are alright?

Yep, I'm able to create multiple tagged VLANs and assign them to a single interface. If I'd thought about this more, I would have realized that I was trying to accomplish redundancy on top of redundancy. Once I stopped and thought about it, I realized that it was pointless.

 

 

Thanks for your help, it's MUCH appreciated!

Just thought I'd post a quick follow-up. Everything is working great. I did run into a bit of an oddity that I can't quite figure out that I thought I'd mention. I configured all three interfaces on the Big-IP VE appliance (not the management NIC) identically. I put them all in the same Distributed Port group.

 

 

This is where it gets odd. If I configure the VLAN on the Big-IP VE appliance to use interface 1.1 "tagged", it doesn't work. If I configure the same VLAN on the Big-IP appliance to use interface 1.2 "tagged", it doesn't work. If I configured the same VLAN on the Big-IP appliance to use interface 1.3 "tagged", it works just fine.

 

 

So, the question remains, with all three interfaces configured identically, why is interface 1.3 the only one that works?

This may help:

 

SOL14684: Error Message: 01070734:3: Configuration error: vmw-compat: vlan member type must be an interface https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/14000/600/sol14684.html