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To Trunk or not to Trunk? That is the question! Read more about it in this blog post.

To Trunk or not to Trunk? That is the question!

January 8, 2019

Large more complex organizations often have to support more complex network topologies while supporting large amounts of traffic and failover at the same time.

F5 allows you to organize network interfaces in so called trunks

Which are logical grouping of network interfaces supporting specific traffic groups. By grouping several interfaces, organizations can achieve greater network bandwidth and introduce redundancy at the network level.

Large numbers of network connections and interfaces introduce additional complexity from a monitoring perspective if we treat network interfaces separately as independent interfaces. In many instances, network interfaces are observed individually and not in the context of the application availability they are supporting. In this way, each network interface failure is critical and it is hard to distinguish between situations where failed network interfaces are not critical, since there can be enough healthy interfaces in the trunk from situations, where failed interfaces can endanger application availability.

Differentiating critical from non-critical issues in organizations is essential to ensure that critical failures are handled first.

With the latest version of HYCU SCOM MP For F5 BIG-IP (5.6) we introduced monitoring of network trunks that allows us to observe network interfaces in context of the traffic groups/trunks they are supporting. Inoperable network interfaces that are part of a trunk will issue warnings instead of critical alerts. The health of the trunk is calculated based on the health of all interfaces in the trunk. Trunks having more than half of network interfaces inoperable will be marked with a warning. Trunks with no operable interfaces will be marked as critical. These thresholds are configurable and are subject to an organization’s pre-defined policy.

f5 big ip chart showing how HYCU helps you track your backups

Whether you decide to use trunks or not, HYCU SCOM MP for F5 BIG-IP will discover network interfaces and trunks automatically and allow you to differentiate critical network failures from non-critical in a more efficient way.

HYCU SCOM MP For F5 BIG-IP now also helps you prevent BIG-IP device outages caused by physical hardware components failures.

A BIG-IP physical device has at least two power supplies and several chassis fans for redundancy and high availability. In case any fans or power supplies fail, you are alerted and you can replace defective parts before any subsequent failure would endanger a BIG-IP device operation. If you need any more information or would like to hear about our product benefits or discuss your monitoring needs, feel free to contact us at info@hycu.com, or you can download a 45-day free trial with full feature set.

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