New F5 Configuration
After hearing my cousin extol the virtues of the F5 platform, I stumbled across a company selling some used 3600 and bought 7 of them (it was a very good deal). I have Gigabit internet at the office, and 2 current colo locations with multiple servers and thought this would be a good thing for us - after 3 or so days, not so much. While my cousin works managing irules, pools and VM's for his work every day, he hasn't been through the initial setup before and though everything looks like it should work, it doesn't. I have gone through much of the getting started video series, but so far nothing helps.
What I am trying to accomplish is not so much load balancing as setting up a single IP in and directing it to split up the traffic based off incoming DNS traffic. Reason is of course the limited nature of public IP's at our locations. Let me outline some basics that will help us talk about the trouble.
Public IP = ppp.ppp.ppp.5 (Port 1.1) Private IP = 192.168.1.5 (Port 1.3) Management IP 100.10.100.5 (Management Port)
I setup my Windows PC on the network to be part of both the 192. network, and the 100. network, and of course it can see all public IP's.
I have a Dell r610 that has 3 virtual machines on it, Windows, Ubuntu, and OSX, their configuration looks like this:
windows.mydomain.com --> 192.168.1.55 ubuntu.mydomain.com --> 192.168.1.56 osx.mydomain.com --> 192.168.1.57
All the DNS for all domains go to: PPP.PPP.PPP.5 and the expectation is to use the F5 to break up that traffic and forward it to the appropriate internal IP. All internal servers would be listening on all ports, so it isn't just that port 80 can make it to the ubuntu server and the others have to listen on a different port.
I setup the self IP's to be Public IP = ppp.ppp.ppp.5 (Port 1.1) Private IP = 192.168.1.5 (Port 1.3)
I setup some pools, and a VM to forward to the pool, but no traffic gets through. I have cleared out the configurations multiple times, and redone it from scratch over and over. I tried using a different F5, but nothing works. I talked to one guy who says it isn't possible, and that I have to do NAT routing and have them all on different ports, and someone else insists it will work, but can't help me. I tried upgrading the firmware to Hotfix-BIGIP-10.2.4-870.0-HF13, but the download button on the site doesn't work.
Is there an idiot's 5 step program I can join to get traffic through like I am discussing? I have a bunch of small appliances that I want to run at the office, and they can't all have public IPs. I also want to take another dedicated machine to the colo, but am out of public IPs there as well.
About all I can think of to do next is to setup a bunch of apache virtual hosts and direct it to network resources and drop the F5 from the picture.