F5 and HPUX 11

[Thomas Stanley_1]

I am attempting to connect an F5 network load balancing appliance with an N class server running HPUX 11.

This N-class server has eight additional NICs(two 4-port cards) installed to support the F5. My hosts file is as follows:

128.1.200.80 hpnclass # lan0
10.1.200.80 hpnclass # lan1
10.1.201.80 hpnclass # lan2
10.1.202.80 hpnclass # lan3
10.1.203.80 hpnclass # lan4
10.1.204.80 hpnclass # lan5
10.1.205.80 hpnclass # lan6
10.1.206.80 hpnclass # lan7
10.1.207.80 hpnclass # lan8

The lan0 NIC is the only one running at the moment, and will be disabled when we cut this over. The lan1-lan8 NICs all have a subnet mask of 255.255.0.0

On the F5, I have set up a self ip address of 10.1.0.0 on a 255.255.0.0 subnet.

Has anyone here had any experience with implementing the F5 with HPUX?

[harry d brown jr]

No experience with F5, but I would use APA - providing my switch could handle it!! It handles failure and would give you close to 800megabits a second based on your 2 4port 100mb cards.

http://docs.hp.com/en/J4240-90027/J4240-90027.pdf

It might cost you $1200 USD (not too sure).

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[Thomas Stanley_1]

Unfortunately the APA software is not an option.

One thing I have noticed is that the routing table on the HP adds a route to the 10.1 network for each NIC that I activate. And that there is a large amount of traffic on those eight cards, mostly arp requests and the like.

And because of the additional routes in the routing table, if I ping one of the 10.1 addresses from the F5, I get multiple duplicates of the response packet (the duplicate count goes up by 2 for each NIC that I have enabled, for a total of 15 dupes if I have all 8 NICS enabled)

[Steven Chen_1]

First, load balancer works better in multiple servers environment. In your case, you have 8 NICs in only one box. Do you have 8 identical applications running on that box, what are they?

Second, your self ip may fit into the same subnet of your 8 NIC Ips. That won't work. You should change either side so that they are in different subnet.

Third, do you want LAN access those 8 applications? Then you need NAT in Internal for those 8 NICs, and put ip of same subnet in External.

[Thomas Stanley_1]

The reason for the eight NICs in the one box is taht the the server is going to be handling a larger amount of traffic due to an effort to migrate our payroll application to it. We will be using BEA Weblogic and Tuxedo to do this.

I have now subnetted the the self IPs and the NICs to a 255.255.255.0 subnet.