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bijulsoni_11500's avatar
bijulsoni_11500
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Apr 17, 2013

Maximum entries in Data group

Hi

 

I have a question about F5's capability to support maximum entries in Data-group. Based upon the documenation on F5, I found that F5 can support maximum 100K entries into data group. In our usage of F5, we are about to reach that limit soon. We use data group entries to do Host-Name to Pool routing and because of 100K limitation on data group, we are not able to scale considering we still have capacity but F5's data group size is becoming the bottleneck.

 

I feel that there may be some innovative ways to overcome this limiation but because of my lack of knowledge in F5 worlds, I am running out of options. Appreciate if someone can reply with possible alternatives to overcome this. We use In-memory datagroups. we haven't tried external data group and not sure what's max limit for external file but I am OK to expore any alternative.

 

Appreciate your reply.

 

Thanks

 

Bijul Soni

 

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5 Replies

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  • What_Lies_Bene1's avatar
    What_Lies_Bene1
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Apr 17, 2013
    Forgive me if I'm stating something you've already thought of but can't you just use a second DG in your iRule?

     

     

    This could be moot anyway as I don't believe that limit actually exists; as far as I'm aware as long as you have enough free memory you can exceed it.
  • Kevin_Stewart's avatar
    Kevin_Stewart
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    Apr 17, 2013
    Bijul Soni is correct. There is a (roughly) 100k entry limitation to data groups today. That, I'm told, will change very soon. In the mean time you have a few options:

     

     

    1. Create multiple data groups - if you can logically separate the data this may be a good option.

     

     

    2. Load the data group values into a table. Tables can support much more data, so you could use an "admin" virtual server and iRule that consumes the data from a client side script (via form post). You may still want to logically separate the data into multiple tables so that they can be spread across multiple TMMs.

     

     

    3. Configure a DNS server to serve TXT records and use RESOLVE::lookup in your iRule.

     

     

    4. Use sideband processing to call a web server. This may be a slower option, but I think it gives you the most flexibility in querying the data.

     

  • hooleylist's avatar
    hooleylist
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Apr 17, 2013
    That, I'm told, will change very soon.

     

     

    Yes, in 11.4 we'll have support for one million or more data group entries.

     

     

    Aaron
  • BaltoStar_12467's avatar
    BaltoStar_12467
    Aug 07, 2013
    I am not having success loading a 100K external data-file into a data-group. f5 crashes when I attempt to load. I've even tried clipping it down to 999990 but no luck.

     

     

    Could someone provide more information on option 2 above ( load the data-group values into a table) ?