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tahir_94337's avatar
tahir_94337
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Jun 28, 2009

Using LTM to load-balance applications in geographically different site

Hi guys

 

 

This seems a relatively simple q but i cannot find anything in product manuals to help: To create a pool, does location of the pool members matter? i.e, some of my pool will be in a geographically different site, is LTM sufficient to load-balance as normal to such a pool?

 

 

I am aware of GTM and its specific design for traffic managements of sites, but i dont see the value for it in this case. The clients are SMS apps which reside in same site as SMSC servers. Now we have to add new SMSC servers in new site, and the clients simply require single VIP to fwd traffic to.

 

 

Pls note, no BIG-IPs in second site since there are no applications in second site.

 

 

Hope it's a quick one, grateful for any guidnace.

2 Replies

  • LTM can load balance to a non-local node as long as there is a route to the node and ideally a route back on the node through LTM to the client.

     

     

    Aaron
  • I too am curious how to accomplish this. I have users at site A who access resources in site B. Site A has a big IP but users at site A are not currently using it for this particular resource but rather are using the big ip at site b which is not local to them. Ideally I would prefer users at site A to use the big ip local to them in order to take advantage of compression and caching on an appliance local to them. The answer below says ensure there is a route to the pool member and back to the big ip. My understanding was that a self IP must be assigned to each big ip that resides on the same subnet as the pool member you are load balancing. Then in the virtual server configure snat or automap which would then use this ip.