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Jason_387767's avatar
Jason_387767
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Apr 04, 2019

Two production data centers and just purchased two i5800's

Hi all, just purchased two i5800's with LTM/APM, and have some questions regarding placement. We have two production data centers with a few vlans being stretched across using OTV. There's a 10GB link between the two data centers and our primary internet connection only being present at one. Out of the gates it would seem that having both bigip's at the same location as our internet connection would be the easiest, but I'm curious if it would be better to have one at each data center (thinking down the road) leveraging them for DR. Thoughts? We're still reeling from F5 training, like drinking from a fire hose. Thanks for any input!

 

BIG-IP
cloud
devops
LTM

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  • youssef1's avatar
    youssef1
    Icon for Cumulonimbus rankCumulonimbus
    Apr 05, 2019

    Hi,

     

    in general we place one equipment by datacenter. the advantage of having a DRP/anoter DC is to having 2 completely independent sites. in case of problems on a site (even the worst problem: fire). the other can take over without problem.

     

    For me the best alternative is to have one equipment in each site (that's what we did for all our customers and it's the best practice to adopt).

     

    Regarding HA between your equipment:

     

    Ed Summers message: Network failover is a heartbeat sent via IP and can be treated as any other network traffic. Depending on network conditions you may need to tune the timeout value (default = 3 seconds)...but 3 seconds is, relatively speaking, a long time. Just consider your overall HA strategy.

     

    https://support.f5.com/csp/article/K2397

     

    Regards