Creating a Virtual Server on F5 BIG IP HA Active/Passive (Active/Standby) on AWS EC2 / VPC

Please visit my previous blog on how to setup an Active/Standby F5 Big IP on AWS here. The blog also covers some basics of F5 terminologies.

Now its time to get your load balancer up and running. You can run multiple instances of load balanced instances on F5. These are called Virtual Servers on F5.

1: Prerequisites:

1. Make sure that you have your backend servers that you want to load balance ready.
2. Make sure that the security groups have the required ports open both for F5 as well as backend server subnets.
3. Make sure that the services you want to load balance on these nodes are running :)

2: Setup Nodes on F5:

1. Goto Local Traffic > Nodes > Node List. Click Create .
2. Give the desired Name and Address.
3. Health Monitors as Node Default.
4. Click Finished

If the node is reachable you should see the node status as a Blue Box.

3: Create a Pool on F5:

1. Goto Local Traffic > Pools > Pool List. Click Create.
2. Enter the desired Name.
3. Select one of the Health Monitors. This is for checking the health of the backend servers.
4. Select the Load Balancing Method.
5. Under New Members. Select Node List and add the desired nodes to the pool.
6. Click Finished .
7. If the pool has been setup properly, it should have a green status.

4: Creating the Virtual Server on F5:

1. Add an additional private IP to the the ENI which in on external VLAN. This becomes your Load Balancer IP.
2. Goto Local Traffic > Virtual Servers > Virtual Server List. Click Create.
3. Enter the desired Name and Type.
4. Source Address is the IP range this VS should accept.To allow access from all IPs enter 0.0.0.0/0.
5. Destination Address should be the new private IP that we just now created.
6. Service Port is the port your service is running on.
7. Source Address Translation should be Auto Map. Please note that if you dont do this your Virtual Server will not work and the request would never reach your backend servers.
8. From Default Pool select the pool that we had created above.
9. Select the other settings as desired. For this exercise, leave the other settings as is.

If the VS has been setup properly, it should show green in the status.

Hit the VS IP and voila! your application is load balanced.

To learn how to integrate AutoScaling with F5 go here