Internal Appliance Networking

Internal appliance networking overview

The rSeries system uses an internal appliance network for control plane and management plane communication between firmware and software on the system. Traffic on this internal network is firewall-protected and is not exposed to a customer’s management network.

Internal rSeries appliance networking can use one of two IP address ranges known as RFC6598 and RFC1918. The RFC6598 address range maps the predefined rSeries internal network range to 100.64/12 IP addresses (the default). The RFC1918 range enables you choose one of 16 possible address ranges in the 10.0.0.0/12 address range.

IP addresses in the predefined range are reserved for the internal network and cannot be used for any of these addresses:

• Management IP addresses for the rSeries system and tenants
• Any external service configured on the rSeriessystem, such as a DNS server and NTP server
• Source IP addresses of any device used to communicate with the rSeries system (such as a laptop, workstation, or other device that connects)

If your network uses addresses in the default predefined range for any of the above, you will not be able to access the rSeries system using the rSeries management interface (including the CLI, webUI, or REST APIs). This is only an issue if you use 100.64.0.0/12 addresses for management IP addresses, external servers, or source IP addresses described here. To prevent this issue, F5 provides a procedure that enables you to select a different internal IP address range during initial provisioning of a system, as an alternative to using the default range.