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Francois_Dumais's avatar
Francois_Dumais
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Mar 04, 2014

Passing from Active-Standby to Active-Active

We would like to take advantage of Global Traffic Manager (GTM) features along with our Local Traffic Manager (LTM). Our F5 production boxes are licensed for GTM although the feature is not activated yet. We have 2 F5 LTM production boxes organized in an Active-Standby mode. Should we decide to go in an Active-Active scheme, what would be the consequence on business continuity? Is the transition to Active-Active transparent? Are there features we should enable (like mirroring) to be able to take advantage of an Active-Active setup? Is this transition risky? Has it already be associated with "losses"? How much of it is trick? What about sessions continuity?

 

Thanks

 

application delivery
BIG-IP DNS
deployment
design
LTM

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  • Kevin_Davies_40's avatar
    Kevin_Davies_40
    Icon for Nacreous rankNacreous
    Mar 12, 2014

    You should consider it an outage to move from one model of HA to another unless...

     

    • You are already running 11.2 or greater.
    • You have a failover-sync group.
    • Everything is already using SNAT.

    Because of the new model of HA, the transition is really a case of creating new HA objects and assigning them to the standby unit. It will then go active and take up the role of running those virtual's. In basic steps this means.

     

    • Create a new traffic group.
    • Create additional floating IP addresses for the new traffic group.
    • Assign relevant virtual addresses to the new traffic group.
    • Assign any snat pools used by those virtual's to the new traffic group. They cannot be shared across both devices as they have to move with the virtual addresses.
    • Turn on mirroring for SNAT pools and Virtual's that need them (only long lived connections)
    • Wait about an hour.
    • Push the new traffic group across to the standby unit.

    The standby will now go active.

     

    Set preferences on the traffic groups so one prefers the original active device and the other prefers the new active device.