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Coliver222_3604's avatar
Coliver222_3604
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
May 03, 2018

F5 lab setup, not able to ping

Hoping some of you pros can give me a hand here. I'm trying to set up a very basic topology with Vmware/GNS3 to learn the basics of big ip LTM.

 

I'm unable to access or ping my the any IP address but the mgmt IP which I have had zero issues with.

 

This is a very basic topology I set up, 3 webservers on the inside with in the subnet 192.168.10.2,.3,.4, F5 ip address 192.168.10.245, vip of 192.168.10.247. The outside I have 2 workstations on 192.168.20.2,.3 F5 outside IPs of 192.168.20.245, VIP 192.168.20.247.

 

So testing this I have had some success pinging back and forth from the webservers, but when I reboot nothing responds anymore. I have tried deleting and and do a new setup with the VM image, and rebuild it from a blank tolopolgy, rebooting the PC, images, everything and nothing seems to work anymore....

 

I am not a linux pro by any stretch, and was hoping someone might lead me to what I am missing here...

 

The mgmt interface I have never had a problem accessing through the VM itself, or when I add the F5 to the gns3 topology and add it to the cloud icon, its using eth0 on the F5.

 

Vlans, I added the internal to 1.2, untagged, the outside to 1.3, untagged and HA to 1.4, untagged. I have 5 vNICs on the F5, with eth0 being mgmt. When I go into the network > VLAN:Vlane List >> they all are tagged under general properties, with 4094. 4093, and 4092 respectively but under the resources they are all untagged. I did save the wireshark capture to ensure I was not going crazy and this was working, and indeed it was working at one point, and zero configuration changes have been made by me.

 

Also to eliminate any type of virtual adapter confusion I have added all the other interfaces to the switch connected to the inside interface and the webserver. I am really sure I have isolated the inside interface as eth2 but again, after rebooting its totally not responding either way anymore. On the wireshark capture all I am seeing is arp requests but nothing but silence from the F5. TCPdumps on the inside interface also show just some internal tcp traffic, but its as if the arps are not even hitting the interface.

 

any troubleshooting steps would be amazing!

 

Cheers.

 

application delivery
BIG-IP
LTM

1 Reply

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  • René_Geile's avatar
    René_Geile
    Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
    May 04, 2018

    Hi,

     

    from my experience a lot of trouble is caused if VMWare is dynamically changing interface order or changing MAC adresses which sometimes happens after reboot or any host system configuration changes. I suggest to carefully check in the hypervisor and in F5 guest: Is the interface for internal VLAN in hypervisor having the same MAC like the interface for internal VLAN in F5 VM? Check every VLAN and interface. If something is wrong you need to remap the interfaces to the correct VLANs in the hypervisor.

     

    There are instructions in the web how to configure static MACs in VMWare Workstation to prevent this from happening.

     

    You can ignore the VLAN ID 409x in F5. The F5 platform always works with a VLAN ID internally, even if the traffic is send out untagged to the network. I suggest to set the VLAN ID to the ID used within your network/switches even for untagged traffic, like some kind of documentation.