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Mark_Cloutier's avatar
Mark_Cloutier
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Apr 15, 2015

vCMP and failover

I am using vCMP for the first time, just purchased two 5250v's to support a migration to Exchange/Lync. Very experienced with LTMs, have used them for almost 16 years now. Basic question, should I be setting up failover/config sync at the vCMP host level, or is that only done on the guest LTMs? I've read the vCMP for Appliance models administration guide, but the "big picture" for failover wasn't real clear to me.....

 

7 Replies

  • Just do failover configit in guest LTM's, GUI is a bit missleading since it shows all options as if it was not a vCMP host.

     

  • There is actually no benefit in putting the vCMP Hosts into a device or traffic group. You won't have the same configuration items on them (they're supposed to run different vCMP guests), nor will they serve any "shared" objects like floating IPs or virtuals. You should run each of your vCMP hosts as independent stand-alone machine and then tie the vCMP guests together using device-groups.

     

  • Why would you not want the vCMP hosts to be able to config sync though? If I make changes to a guest on one vCMP guest, like add a vlan, then I would want that change to sync to the other vCMP guest on the other host in the event of a failover?

     

    • nathe's avatar
      nathe
      Icon for Cirrocumulus rankCirrocumulus
      Steven, even with appliances you have to manually add VLANs to both devices, this is not part of the configsync. So in that case vCMP guests does not mean any extra work. Assign the VLANs to the guest in the host gui (on both hosts) and then assign the self IPs.
    • Steven_J__Willi's avatar
      Steven_J__Willi
      Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
      Ok that makes sense. Sorry I am just struggling to wrap my head around the vCMP concept. First time dealing with this. In previous situations my companies have just purchased new HA pairs for expansion. How does the networking work for vCMP guests? So they share links with the hosts? Currently I have 1.1 from each host connected into my PCI zone and 1.2 connected to a downstream failover switch for HA. So when I look into the vCMP guest I see interfaces 0.3 and 0.4? What does that mean? Should I be using a HA vlan within the Guests like I would the hosts if vCMP was not configured?
    • nathe's avatar
      nathe
      Icon for Cirrocumulus rankCirrocumulus
      This post explains the interfaces query, probably better than i could "https://devcentral.f5.com/s/feed/0D51T00006i7Zc7SAE". Hope this helps. And yes to the HA Vlan query.