Customer can no longer access the application through the vip in a 3 node cluster configuration. Could access the individual nodes with their FQDN.

Products

• VMware Aria Suite

Issue/Introduction

 F5 Loadbalancer was used for the customer Network solution for High Availability. Some change were done to the loadbalancer configuration before this issue occurred.

Environment

VMware Identity Manager 3.3.7

Customer's 3 node cluster IDM Cluster is configured with F5 Loadbalancer for High Availability,

Cause

The F5 Loadbalancer configuration change was worked on before this issue occurred.

 It was identified that the SelfIP addresses that are needed for IDM Appliance VIP to work,  were not present in the configuration.

Note: One should assign one static Self IP address and one Floating Self IP address to each of the default VLANs (internal and external)

Resolution

Configure the two SelfIP addresses to make the IDM loadbalancer work.

After configuring the two SelfIP addresses (One StaticIP and one Floating SelfIP) in the loadbalancer configuration for IDM, the IDM appliance was accessible through VIP.

 

Additional Information

F5 Loadbalancer from Broadcom:

https://www.f5.com/pdf/solution-center/f5-big-ip-vmware-workspaceone-integration-guide.pdf

An F5 load balancer distributes network traffic across multiple servers to improve application performance, reliability, and availability. This network solution that can be used on-premises (also in Cloud).

While a load balancer helps minimize the risk of failure of each individual system behind it, that load balancer is a single point of failure. It doesn't matter if all the other systems behind it are in good condition, if that load balancer fails, the services will become unavailable.

In this case the customer still could access the individual IDM Appliance nodes, but the issue needed to be fixed for high availability.