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MikeCarlson_325's avatar
MikeCarlson_325
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Nov 02, 2017

ConfigSync best practices in an HA environment

I'm relatively new to BigIP load balancers. Recently I found myself in a position where I've inherited a few existing appliances with no documentation nor configuration management practices after a long-time employee left the company.

 

Although the underlying hardware platforms vary each of the three discrete environments is configured in an HA configuration with two appliances. Two of the environments are 10.2.4 Build 860.0 Hotfix HF10, one is 11.6.1 Build 0.0.317 Final.

 

I've discovered that all three of these environments have not had their configurations pushed from the active to the standby appliance for a handful of months. The question I have is around the best practices for keeping the configuration updated between the Active and Standby appliances. Is it common to push the config to the standby appliance immediately after every change is made? Once a day? Once a week?

 

2 Replies

  • P_K's avatar
    P_K
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    Its always good practice to sync them after a change is performed. You always need to keep your devices in sync which is whole point of having HA.

     

  • if the answer was not helpful you should not have flagged it as such ;)

     

    auto sync is available for failover groups. with your 10.x version it is different though, the whole concept of failover and sync only doesn't exist.

     

    we still have discussions about auto sync with customers. it has it benefits certainly for high availability. not doing it means quite often people forgetting to sync and then it becomes unclear if it should happen and from which node.

     

    personally i sync after im sure the change didn't have a negative impact. auto sync seems a little dangerous, certainly during replacing units and upgrades and such.

     

    but i believe it remains a personal choice.