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BA_7682
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Sep 12, 2012

LTM VE on VirtualBox - Load Balance same subnet

Hi Members,

 

I recently installed BigIP LTM VE on virtualbox 4.1.6. Here is what I intend to achieve.

 

There is a test http service running on a server with IP 10.X.X.30 and on ports 8080 and 8081. My LTM VE IP is on the same subnet say 10.X.X.40. I want load balance the http traffic on these ports by connecting to the BigIP VIP, also 10.X.X.40, on http port 80.

 

 

I am accessing both these machines via ssh tunnels using port forwarding.

 

I can access 10.X.X.30 for both 8080 and 8081 directly on http. I can also access BigIP LTM GUI 10.X.X.40 on https from my PC. Both using localhost and local ports because of port fowarding

 

The IP 10.X.X.40 on virtual machine uses PCnet-FAST III (Bridged adapter, eth0). The available interfaces are 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3 which use Intel PRO/1000 MT Server (Host-only adapter, 'vboxnet0').

 

Can I use the same Virtual Server IP as the eth0 IP 10.X.X.40? How should I proceed with the configuration?

 

 

Thanks

 

 

 

3 Replies

  • Hi

     

    I'm new to BIG-IP and curious to know about installation steps in detail:

     

    What version to download ?

     

    Do we need any specific setting to tweak on VirtualBox?

     

    Do we need to install TMOS first and then LTM on top of that?

     

     

    Ta ! Rajesh

     

     

     

  • You can get a free trial VE for v10 but it's pretty old now. If you have one, I'd ask your F5 SE/agent/rep for a trial/lab key for the latest version.

     

     

    Not sure about using it on VirtualBox.

     

     

    TMOS Contains everything you need in a single package, certainly where LTM is concerned.

     

     

    A rough ordered list of configuration steps (after any hypervisor related tasks) would look like this;

     

     

    •Management network interface IP address and route

     

    •Licensing

     

    •Provisioning

     

    •Disk partitions, TMOS upgrades and hotfix installations

     

    •Hostname, local host file

     

    •Administrative Partitions

     

    •Local user accounts, remote authentication and user roles

     

    •DNS, NTP, SNMP, SMTP, Logging, log rotation etc.

     

    •Management tasks such as configuration backups and management routes, service failure actions and time zone

     

    •Security (password policy, banners, timeouts, source address persistence)

     

    •Physical Interfaces and Trunks

     

    •VLANs, STP, LLDP

     

    •Route Domains

     

    •Self IPs, ARP and NDP

     

    •LTM Routing

     

    •Failover and Configsync etc.

     

    •Global settings such as PMTUD, Auto Last Hop and L2 cache aging time

     

    •Nodes

     

    •Health Monitors

     

    •Pools

     

    •NATs

     

    •SSL Certificate installation

     

    •Profiles (persistence, protocol, SSL, HTTP, HTTP compression, Web Acceleration)

     

    •iRules, Data Groups, iFiles

     

    •Virtual Servers
  • Oh, and if you are load balancing servers/hosts in the same subnet, you'll need to configure SNAT to ensure traffic returns to the F5, not directly to the requesting host.