ACE 4710: Communication between contexts

[oiic4-redes]

Our topology is as follows:

CISCO ACE 4710

Two contexts A and B

External VLAN shared, with Context A IP, Context B IP, Gateway IP

We need to make connections from rserver in context A to VIP in context B.

We have created static routes in both contexts:

Contex A

Route to VIP B through gateway

Context B

Route to rserver A thorugh gateway

This is the way recommended in other discussion.

The connections don´t get established. Sometimes they get established but it take a long time.

Connections between Rserver in A to Rserver in B are OK.

Is it possible to use the VIP IP address for connections?

Thanks.

[chrhiggi]

It is hard to tell without seeing a sniffer trace what is going on, but to me, it sounds like some flavor of non symetric traffic flow.  ACE will not accept traffic from a source MAC that is knows is configured elsewhere on its own physical blade/chassis.  Routing it should resolve this as you are trying to do. However, there are a few gotachas about that.  ACE expects to recieve traffic symetrically, so if the server can see context A directly and does not have to follow a path back through the routers to get to it, this won't work (use source NAT on context A and B to control flow of traffic in that scenario.) As well... ACE will not route what it can see is already L2 adjacent in its connection table.  If either context sees the next hop, it won't route the traffic even with a static route there.

Hope that helps,

Chris