Forum Discussion
johns
May 11, 2011Employee
Andy,
Take a look at the manual, http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/ltm_implementation/sol_vlans.html1062182. There are couple of diagrams there, which unfortunately comes across very fuzzy, at least to me. In bridge mode, there is flat network, say 10.0.0/24, using the manual as the example, and the servers being load balanced, LTM, and the default gateway for the network is al on the same subnet. The router for the network is 10.0.0.2 and the LTM is at 10.0.0.5. The servers are at 10.0.0.3 and 10.0.0.4. LTM is NOT going to be the gateway for the servers, the router is. They are in the same L2 broadcast domain.
Your scenarios 1 and 2 are both L3 routed mode. Once upon a time (v4 days), you did not have to have forwarding virtual server and SNAT would take care of outbound connections (or inbound as the case may be) to and from the servers across LTM.