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Bruce_Walker_11's avatar
Bruce_Walker_11
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Jun 25, 2010

Active / Standby Failover between BIGIP 1600 and 6400

Hi,

 

 

Haven't been able to find anything on the askF5 or Devcentral site as to whether the following is possible or not:

 

 

Currently I have two 6400's setup, need to break the pair and set one up at another data center, wanted to use the 1600 in the meantime as a fallback.

 

 

I was just looking to do network based failover between the two units. They would be using VLAN and Gateway Failsafe.

 

 

The end goal would be active / standby failover with BIGIP 6400 as the Active unit and BIGIP 1600 as the standby. Both are running:

 

BIG-IP Version 9.4.5 1086.1

 

Hotfix HF2 Edition

 

 

The 6400 has more interfaces configured into Trunks (6 copper) and the 1600 has only 4 copper which is one problem I can see.

 

 

Unfortunately I don't have enough spare equipment to test this.

 

 

Any thoughts?

 

 

Thanks,

 

 

Bruce

 

config
design

7 Replies

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  • Chris_Miller's avatar
    Chris_Miller
    Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
    Jun 25, 2010
    I don't see why it would be a problem - the failover mechanism should only care about the network transport protocol - which has issues between versions, but shouldn't between hardware. The trunk differences wouldn't be copied in a sync anyways so I don't see a problem - might be one of those "works but F5 doesn't recommend" type of scenarios.
  • Chris_Miller's avatar
    Chris_Miller
    Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
    Jun 29, 2010
    Posted By Bruce Walker on 06/28/2010 05:07 PM

     

    Thanks Chris,

     

     

    I'll give it a shot, fingers crossed.

     

     

    Bruce

     

     

    Let us know how it goes Bruce - it's actually a really cool scenario. In my case, I have 8900s as both active and standby because I'm in retail and can't afford issues if a smaller unit couldn't handle traffic - for some businesses though, a smaller unit as a standby might not be a bad idea - especially if money is tight and you just need something to handle traffic during emergencies or maintenance.
  • Steve_Scott_873's avatar
    Steve_Scott_873
    Historic F5 Account
    Jun 29, 2010
    Be interested to know as well. We're going to be upgrading when our 6400s go EOSD in a year and a bit. Would be interesting to know if i can just slot the new model in and restore the backup from the enterprise manager.
  • Chris_Miller's avatar
    Chris_Miller
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    Jun 29, 2010
    Posted By Steve Scott on 06/29/2010 06:48 AM

     

    Be interested to know as well. We're going to be upgrading when our 6400s go EOSD in a year and a bit. Would be interesting to know if i can just slot the new model in and restore the backup from the enterprise manager.

     

     

    I don't think you'll be able to do that too easily - while failover isn't a big deal between units, config sync/restorations definitely are. You'd for sure get a licensing issue since your config file would have an existing license but you could get around that simply be relicensing the new unit - your problem will be that the config file contains unit specific information like interfaces and what not - your best bet might just be to copy the files that aren't unit specific.
  • Steve_Scott_873's avatar
    Steve_Scott_873
    Historic F5 Account
    Jun 30, 2010
    We'd get the licensing issue when we replace the unit from an RMA, thats fairly easy to deal with. I guess the platform specifics depend on interface numbers more than anything. If they're the same then I guess it should work. If they're different I guess i need to alter bigip_base.conf and correct those.
  • Chris_Miller's avatar
    Chris_Miller
    Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
    Jun 30, 2010
    Posted By Steve Scott on 06/30/2010 05:17 AM

     

    We'd get the licensing issue when we replace the unit from an RMA, thats fairly easy to deal with. I guess the platform specifics depend on interface numbers more than anything. If they're the same then I guess it should work. If they're different I guess i need to alter bigip_base.conf and correct those.

     

     

    Exactly - it'd just be modifying certain files - which you could probably do from within the UCS archive too if you wanted to restore via that method instead of file copies.