Expressway-E behind the F5 Load Balancer

[Sushant Sharma]

Dear Experts,

Can we deploy Expressway-e for MRA behind the F5 Load balancer ?

[Manish Gogna]

Hi Sushant,
Please check the following post with similar query

https://supportforums.cisco.com/discussion/12944191/vcse-or-exp-e-external-communication-f5-load-balancer

HTH

Manish

[Sushant Sharma]

Dear Manish,

The answer is not clear there.

I want to you F5 just for L7 inspection.  I don't want to achieve any Load balancing. I will use dedicated Public IP for both the servers.

[SAIFUDEEN C .K]

Dear Sushant,

Have you got the answer for this query.

We have the same requirement.Please help us if you have any comments.

Thanks

Saif

[Jaime Valencia]

No, a load balancer is not supported with MRA, the MRA documentation outlines the design that is supported and it does not include/mention the use of any load balancer in front of EXP-E

[SAIFUDEEN C .K]

Thanks for the response.
My query was to introduce F5 for L7 inspection not for load balancing.

[Matthew.BOLLARD]

Is anyone able to provide a confirmation, that this advice is still valid. i.e. that a load balancer is not supported with MRA

[Roger Kallberg]

Even if it’s not strictly technically supported we have been using F5 for years with MRA to provide geoDNS functionality. As such it is not acting as a load balancer, it just answers the DNS query for the SRV record and monitors the availability of the E nodes to direct the client to the nearest DC based on locality.

[jwilson]

Same here.  Expressway MRA behind F5 geoDNS appears to work.   The issue became for us is if an Expressway was unreachable  Our current F5 geoDNS config sends the traffic anyways.  Now looking at ways to alert and remove the Expressway from the Pool if it fails an advanced health check.  ICMP is not always enough.

[Roger Kallberg]

We monitor the ports that the MRA service uses on each Expressway node with the monitoring functionality in F5. I can provide a screenshot of the configuration in F5 when I’m at work tomorrow.

[Roger Kallberg]

This is how we have it setup in F5.

Do note that we use the Webex application, so we no longer have the XMPP (port 5222) protocol as part of the monitored ports. When we did use Jabber and CUPS for the IM and presence part we had that as well in the set list of monitors.

[jwilson]

This is helpful.  Thank you.