NimbostratusDo F5s continue to advertise virtual server IPs after they have been disabled or deleted?
I've been doing a migration from a pair of 1500s running 10.2.4 to a pair of 5000's running 11.4.1.
After disabling the virtual servers on the old HA pair I enabled them using the same IP addresses on the new F5s. Set up was the same except the new F5s had new self-ips.
The websites came up on the new boxes, but after a short time went down, Nagios reporting http errors. We set one new F5 to standby, then the second, which forced the first back into active mode and the websites came back.
It has been suggested to me that the new pair do some kind of arp table clearance every 12 hours, and that this might be the cause, in which case the issue might be that they are not configured correctly.
From a network perspective, an arp query on the network stacks gave two MAC addresses advertising the same IP address for the migrated websites. One was the MAC address utilised by spanning tree on the active new 5000 and the other was that of the old active 1500.
Do F5s ever continue to advertise IPs for virtual servers that have been disabled or is this more likely to be cached elsewhere? I also deleted one of the virtual servers from the 1500s as a further test.
Unfortunately the issues were such that I've had to roll back all virtual servers to the 1500s and power down the new 5000s so further trouble shooting is not possible, but if anyone has any info on this that would be greatly appreciated.
The LTM should not respond to ARP requests for an IP address assigned to a disabled virtual server. I'm guessing that something is cached within your network, or something is still enabled when it shouldn't be on your 1500s.
