Applies To:
Show VersionsBIG-IP AAM
- 13.0.1, 13.0.0
BIG-IP APM
- 13.0.1, 13.0.0
BIG-IP Link Controller
- 13.0.1, 13.0.0
BIG-IP Analytics
- 13.0.1, 13.0.0
BIG-IP LTM
- 13.0.1, 13.0.0
BIG-IP AFM
- 13.0.1, 13.0.0
BIG-IP PEM
- 13.0.1, 13.0.0
BIG-IP DNS
- 13.0.1, 13.0.0
BIG-IP ASM
- 13.0.1, 13.0.0
Introduction to failover
When you configure a Sync-Failover device group as part of device service clustering (DSC®), you ensure that a user-defined set of application-specific IP addresses, known as a floating traffic group, can fail over to another device in that device group if necessary. DSC failover gives you granular control of the specific configuration objects that you want to include in failover operations.
If you want to exclude certain devices on the network from participating in failover operations, you simply exclude them from membership in that particular Sync-Failover device group.
What triggers failover?
The BIG-IP system initiates failover of a traffic group according to any of several events that you define. These events fall into these categories:
- System fail-safe
- With system fail-safe, the BIG-IP system monitors various hardware components, as well as the heartbeat of various system services. You can configure the system to initiate failover whenever it detects a heartbeat failure.
- Gateway fail-safe
- With gateway fail-safe, the BIG-IP system monitors traffic between an active BIG-IP® system in a device group and a pool containing a gateway router. You can configure the system to initiate failover whenever some number of gateway routers in a pool of routers becomes unreachable.
- VLAN fail-safe
- With VLAN fail-safe, the BIG-IP system monitors network traffic going through a specified VLAN. You can configure the system to initiate failover whenever the system detects a loss of traffic on the VLAN and the fail-safe timeout period has elapsed.
- HA groups
- With an HA group, the BIG-IP system monitors the availability of resources for a specific traffic group. Examples of resources are trunk links, pool members, and VIPRION® cluster members. If resource levels fall below a user-defined level, the system triggers failover.
- Auto-failback
- When you enable auto-failback, a traffic group that has failed over to another device fails back to a preferred device when that device is available. If you do not enable auto-failback for a traffic group, and the traffic group fails over to another device, the traffic group remains active on that device until that device becomes unavailable.
About IP addresses for failover
Part of configuring a Sync-Failover device group is configuring failover. Configuring failover requires you to specify certain types of IP addresses on each device. Some of these IP addresses enable continual, high availability (HA) communication among devices in the device group, while other addresses ensure that application traffic processing continues when failover occurs.
The IP addresses that you need to specify as part of HA configuration are:
- A local, static self IP address for VLAN HA
- This unicast self IP address is the main address that other devices in the device group use to communicate continually with the local device to assess the health of that device. When a device in the device group fails to receive a response from the local device, the BIG-IP® system triggers failover.
- A local management IP address
- This unicast management IP address serves the same purpose as the static self IP address for VLAN HA, but is only used when the local device is unreachable through the HA static self IP address.
- One or more floating IP addresses associated with a traffic group
- These are the IP addresses that application traffic uses when passing through a BIG-IP system. Each traffic group on a device includes application-specific floating IP addresses as its members. Typical traffic group members are: floating self IP addresses, virtual addresses, NAT or SNAT translation addresses, and IP addresses associated with an iApp application service. When a device with active traffic groups becomes unavailable, the active traffic groups become active on other device in the device group. This ensures that application traffic processing continues with little to no interruption.
Specifying IP addresses for failover communication
About traffic groups
Traffic groups are the core component of failover. A traffic group is a collection of related configuration objects, such as a floating self IP address, a floating virtual IP address, and a SNAT translation address, that run on a BIG-IP® device. Together, these objects process a particular type of application traffic on that device.
When a BIG-IP® device goes offline, a traffic group floats (that is, fails over) to another device in the device group to make sure that application traffic continues to be processed with minimal interruption in service.
A traffic group is first active on the device you created it on. If you want an active traffic group to be active on a different device than the one you created it on, you can force the traffic group to switch to a standby state. This causes the traffic group to fail over to (and become active on) another device in the device group. The device it fails over to depends on how you configured the traffic group when you created it.
About pre-configured traffic groups
Each new BIG-IP® device comes with two pre-configured traffic groups:
- traffic-group-1
- A floating traffic group that initially contains any floating self IP addresses that you create on the device. If the device that this traffic group is active on goes down, the traffic group goes active on another device in the device group.
- traffic-group-local-only
- A non-floating traffic group that contains the static self IP addresses that you configure for VLANs internal and external. This traffic group never fails over to another device.
Failover objects and traffic group association
Any traffic group that you explicitly create on the BIG-IP® system is a floating traffic group. The types of configuration objects that you can associate with a floating traffic group are:
- Virtual IP addresses
- NATs
- SNAT translation addresses
- Self IP addresses
- Folders (such as an iApps® folder)
You can associate configuration objects with a traffic group in these ways:
- You can rely on the folders in which the objects reside to inherit the traffic group that you assign to the root folder.
- You can use the BIG-IP Configuration utility to directly associate a traffic group with an iApp application service, a virtual IP address, a NAT or SNAT translation address, or a floating self IP address.
- You can use the BIG-IP® Configuration utility to directly associate a traffic group with a folder.
Before you configure a traffic group
The following considerations apply to traffic groups:
- On each device in a Sync-Failover device group, the BIG-IP® system automatically assigns the default floating traffic group name to the root and /Common folders.
- The BIG-IP system creates all traffic groups in the /Common folder, regardless of the partition to which the system is currently set.
- Any traffic group named other than traffic-group-local-only is a floating traffic group.
- You can specify a floating traffic group on a folder only when the device group that is set on the folder is a Sync-Failover type of device-group.
- You can set a floating traffic group on only those objects that reside in a folder with a device group of type Sync-Failover.
- Setting the traffic group on a failover object to traffic-group-local-only prevents the system from synchronizing that object to other devices in the device group.
Creating a traffic group
Perform this task when you want to create a traffic group for a BIG-IP® device. You can perform this task on any BIG-IP device within the device group, and the traffic group becomes active on the local device.
Adding members to a traffic group
You perform this task to add members to a newly-created or existing traffic group. Traffic group members are the floating IP addresses associated with application traffic passing through the BIG-IP® system. Typical members of a traffic group are: a floating self IP address, a floating virtual address, and a floating SNAT translation address.
Viewing a list of traffic groups for a device
- On the Main tab, click .
- In the Name column, view the names of the traffic groups on the local device.
Viewing the members of a traffic group
Traffic group properties
This table lists and describes the properties of a traffic group.
Property | Description |
---|---|
Name | The name of the traffic group, such as traffic-group-1. |
Partition | The name of the folder or sub-folder in which the traffic group resides. |
Description | A user-defined description of the traffic group. |
MAC Masquerade Address | A user-created MAC address that floats on failover, to minimize ARP communications and dropped connections. |
Current Device | The device on which a traffic group is currently running. |
Next Active Device | The device currently most available to accept a traffic group if failover of that traffic group should occur. |
HA Group | The HA group that you created and assigned to this traffic group. (This setting is optional.) |
HA Group Status | Indicates whether an HA group is enabled for this traffic group. |
Failover Method | The possible failover methods to configure: Failover to Device With Best HA Score and Failover using Preferrred Device Order and then Load Aware. This property also shows whether auto-failback is enabled for this traffic group. |
Failover Order | An ordered list of devices that the BIG-IP® system uses to determine the next-active device for the traffic group. |
HA Load Factor | A numeric value pertaining to load-aware failover that represents the application traffic load of this traffic group relative to other active traffic groups on the same device. |
Active and standby states
On each device, a particular floating traffic group is in either an active state or a standby state. In an active state, a traffic group on a device processes application traffic. In a standby state, a traffic group on a device is idle.
For example, on Device A, traffic-group-1 might be active, and on Device B, traffic-group-1 might be standby. Similarly, on Device B, traffic-group-2 might be active, and on Device A, traffic-group-2 might be standby.
When a device with an active traffic group becomes unavailable, the traffic group floats to (that is, becomes active on) another device. The BIG-IP® system chooses the target device for failover based on how you initially configured the traffic group when you created it. Note that the term floats means that on the target device, the traffic group switches from a standby state to an active state.
Traffic group states before failover
Traffic group states after failover
When Device A comes back online, the traffic group becomes standby on Device A.
About active-standby vs. active-active configurations
A device group that contains only one floating traffic group is known as an active-standby configuration.
A device group that contains two or more floating traffic groups is known as an active-active configuration. You can then choose to make all of the traffic groups active on one device in the device group, or you can balance the traffic group load by making some of the traffic groups active on other devices in the device group.
Viewing the failover state of a device
- Display any screen of the BIG-IP Configuration utility.
- In the upper left corner of the screen, view the failover state of the device.
Viewing the state of a traffic group
- On the Main tab, click .
- In the Failover Status area of the screen, view the state of all traffic groups on the device.
Forcing a traffic group to a standby state
You perform this task when you want the selected traffic group on the local device to fail over to another device (that is, switch to a Standby state). Users typically perform this task when no automated method is configured for a traffic group, such as auto-failback or an HA group. By forcing the traffic group into a Standby state, the traffic group becomes active on another device in the device group. For device groups with more than two members, you can choose the specific device to which the traffic group fails over.
Managing failover using HA groups
Sometimes a traffic group within a BIG-IP® Sync-Failover device group needs a certain number of resources to be up -- resources like pool members, trunk links, VIPRION ®cluster members, or some combination of these.
With HA groups, you can define the minimum number of resources that a traffic group needs for it to stay active on its current device. If resources fall below that number, the traffic group fails over to a device with more resources. An HA group:
- Monitors resource availability on current and next-active devices for an active traffic group
- Calculates an HA "resource" score on each device for choosing the next-active device
Creating an HA group
You use this task to create an HA group for a traffic group on a device in a BIG-IP® device group. An HA group is most useful when you want an active traffic group on a device to fail over to another device based on trunk and pool availability, and on VIPRION® systems, also cluster availability. You can create multiple HA groups on a single BIG-IP device, and you associate each HA group with the local instance of a traffic group.
Enabling an HA group for an existing traffic group
You use this task to associate an HA group with an existing traffic group. You associate an HA group with a traffic group when you want the traffic group to fail over to another device in the device group due to issues with trunk, pool, and/or VIPRION® cluster availability. Once a BIG-IP ®device determines through this association that an active traffic group should fail over, the system chooses the next-active device, according to the failover method that you configure on the traffic group: An ordered list of devices, load-aware failover based on device capacity and traffic load, or the HA score derived from the HA group configuration.
Example of an HA group deployment
This illustration shows three sample devices with two active traffic groups. We've configured both traffic groups to use HA groups to define acceptable criteria for trunk health. Although it's not shown here, we'll assume that traffic-group-1 and traffic-group-2 use the HA score and the Preferred Device Order failover methods, respectively, to pick their next-active devices.
In our example, we see that on both BIG-IP A and BIG-IP B, three of four trunk links are currently up, which meets the minimum criteria specified in the HA groups assigned to traffic-group-1 and traffic-group-2 on those devices. This allows each traffic group to stay active on its current device.
Now suppose that the trunk on BIG_IP A loses another link. We see that even though BIG-IP A is still up, traffic-group-1 has failed over because BIG-IP A no longer meets the HA group criteria for hosting the traffic group: only two of four trunk links are now up on that device.
Because we've configured traffic-group-1 to use HA scores to select the next-active device, the traffic group fails over to BIG-IP C, because this is the device with the most trunk links up and therefore has the highest HA score for hosting this traffic group.
As for traffic-group-2, it stays on its current device because BIG-IP B still meets the minumum criteria specified in its HA group.
About next-active device selection
For every active traffic group in your device group, the BIG-IP® Configuration utility displays the current device, meaning the device that a traffic group is currently active on.
The BIG-IP® system can also tell you the device that is to be the next-active device. The next-active device is the device that the traffic group will fail over to if the traffic group has to fail over for some reason.
The device labeled as next-active for a traffic group can change at any time, depending on:
- Which devices are currently available in the device group
- Which device is best able to take on extra traffic group load
- Which device has the most available trunk, pool, or VIPRION® cluster members (if you're using the HA groups feature)
You can tell the BIG-IP system how to choose a next-active device for a traffic group by configuring the traffic group's failover method. The available failover methods are Failover to Device With Best HA Score and Failover using Preferred Device Order and then Load Aware.
About using HA scores to pick the next-active device
An HA score is a numeric value that the BIG-IP® system calculates independently for each instance of a particular traffic group, when you have assigned an HA group to each traffic group instance. For each traffic group instance, the HA group's monitoring function determines the availability of certain resources such as trunk links, pool members, or VIPRION® cluster members.
The BIG-IP system uses these per-instance scores to decide which device has the most resources that the traffic group needs, such as trunk links or pool members. The higher the score for a traffic group instance, the higher the availability of needed resources.
You must have an HA group assigned to each instance of the same traffic group in order for the system to calculate an HA score. An HA score is calculated based on how the corresponding HA group is configured. Whenever the HA group for the active traffic group decides to trigger failover, the traffic group automatically fails over to the device with the highest score.
To get the BIG-IP to base the selection of a traffic group's next-active device on an HA score, you configure the Failover to Device with Best HA Score Failover Method setting on a floating traffic group.
Factors in HA score calculation
The BIG-IP® system calculates an HA health score per traffic group on a device, based on weight, minimum threshold, sufficient threshold, and active bonus values that you specify when you configure an HA group.
An HA group is a sum of the components (trunk(s), pool(s), cluster member(s)). If the minimum (defined by the 'minimum-threshold') is violated for any component, then the total HA Group score is set to 0. If a component value is 0 because it has 0 members (but also has a minimum-threshold equal to 0) then the group is summed normally.
For example, in this case:
Customer configured HA-group on 2 trunks with single member each, where each trunk weight is 50, when both trunks are up the score is 100 (excluding active-bonus), however when a single trunk fails the whole score goes to 0 and unit fails over. The minimum-threshold was set to 1 for trunks in the HA Group.
By setting the minimum threshold to 0 for this case:
root@(bigip12-ve)(cfg-sync In Sync)(Standby)(/Common)(tmos)# modify sys ha-group HA-GROUP trunks modify { all { minimum-threshold 0} }
Now when one trunk fails, there is still 1 trunk up and with the minimum threshold equal to 0, the group score is not set to 0. The score for the group will be the sum of the 1 trunk which is 50.
HA score weight value
A weight is a health value that you assign to each member of the HA group (that is, a pool, trunk, and/or VIPRION® cluster). The weight that you assign to each HA group member must be in the range of 10 through 100.
The maximum overall weight that the BIG-IP system can potentially calculate is the sum of the individual weights for the HA group members, plus the active bonus value. There is no limit to the sum of the member weights for the HA group as a whole.
HA score minimum threshold value (optional)
For each member of an HA group, you can specify a setting known as a minimum threshold. A minimum threshold is a value that specifies the number of object members that must be available to prevent failover. The system factors in a threshold value when it calculates the overall score for the traffic group or device.
The way that the BIG-IP system calculates the score depends on the number of object members that are actually available as compared to the configured minimum threshold value:
- If the number of available object members is less than the threshold, the BIG-IP system assigns a score of 0 to the HA group member so that the score of that HA group member no longer contributes to the overall score.
For example, if a trunk in the HA group has four trunk members and you specify a minimum threshold value of 3, and the number of available trunk members falls to 2, then the trunk contributes a score of 0 to the total score for the traffic group or device.
- If the number of available object members equals or exceeds the minimum threshold value, or you do not specify a minimum threshold, the BIG-IP system calculates the score as described previously, by multiplying the percentage of available object members by the weight for each HA group member and then adding the scores to determine the overall score for the traffic group or device.
The minimum threshold that you define for pools can be less than or equal to the number of members in the pool. For clusters, the threshold can be less than or equal to the number of possible blades in the chassis, and for trunks, the minimum threshold can be less than or equal to the number of possible members in a trunk for that platform.
HA score sufficient threshold value (optional)
When you've configured the BIG-IP® system to use HA scores to pick the next-active device for a traffic group, the traffic group will fail over whenever another device has a higher score for that same traffic group. This means that an active traffic group could potentially fail over frequently because it will fail over even when its HA group's minimum threshold value is still met.
To mitigate this problem, you can define a sufficient threshold value. The sufficient threshold value specifies the amount of available resource (of a trunk, pool, or cluster) that is considered good enough to prevent the traffic group from failing over when another device has a higher score.
The default value for the Sufficient Threshold setting is All, which means that the system considers the amount of available resource to be sufficent when all of its component members are available. For example, if a trunk has a total of four links, and you specify the default sufficient threshold value, then all of the trunk links must be up to prevent failover when another device has a higher HA score. If you specify a sufficient threshold of 3, then only three of the four trunk links must be up to prevent failover when another device has a higher HA score.
HA score active bonus value
An active bonus is an amount that the BIG-IP system automatically adds to the overall HA score of an active traffic group or device. An active bonus ensures that the traffic group or device remains active when its score would otherwise temporarily fall below the score of the standby traffic group on another device. The active bonus that you configure can be in the range of 0 to 100.
A common reason to specify an active bonus is to prevent failover due to flapping, the condition where failover occurs frequently as a trunk member switches rapidly between availability and unavailability. In this case, you might want to prevent the HA scoring feature from triggering failover each time a trunk member is lost. You might also want to prevent the HA scoring feature from triggering failover when you make minor changes to the BIG-IP system configuration, such as adding or removing a trunk member.
For example, suppose that the HA group for a traffic group on each device contains a trunk with four members, and you assign a weight of 30 to each trunk. Without an active bonus defined, if the trunk on one device loses some number of members, failover occurs because the overall calculated score for that traffic group becomes lower than that of a peer device. You can prevent this failover from occurring by specifying an active bonus value.
The BIG-IP system uses an active bonus to contribute to the HA score of an active traffic group only; the BIG-IP system never uses an active bonus to contribute to the score of a standby traffic group.
To decide on an active bonus value, calculate the trunk score for some number of failed members (such as one of four members), and then specify an active bonus that results in a trunk score that is greater than the weight that you assigned to the trunk.
For example, if you assigned a weight of 30 to the trunk, and one of the four trunk members fails, the trunk score becomes 23 (75% of 30), putting the traffic group at risk for failover. However, if you specified an active bonus of 8 or higher, failover would not actually occur, because a score of 8 or higher, when added to the score of 23, is greater than 30.
Example of HA health score calculation
This example illustrates the way that HA group configuration results in the calculation of an HA health score for a traffic group on a specific device. Suppose that you previously created an HA group for traffic-group-1 on all device group members and that traffic-group-1 is currently active on device Bigip_A. Also suppose that on device Bigip_B, the HA group for traffic-group-1 consists of two pools and a trunk, with weights that you assign:
HA group object | Member count | User-specified weight |
---|---|---|
http_pool | 8 | 50 |
ftp_pool | 6 | 20 |
trunk1 | 4 | 30 |
Now suppose that on device Bigip_B, the current member availability of pool http_pool, pool ftp_pool, and trunk trunk1 is 5, 6, and 3, respectively. The resulting HA score that the BIG-IP system calculates for traffic-group-1 on Bigip_B is shown here:
HA group object | Member count | Available member count | User-specified weight | Current HA score |
---|---|---|---|---|
http_pool | 8 | 5 (62.5%) | 50 | 31 (60% x 50) |
ftp_pool | 6 | 6 (100%) | 20 | 20 (100% x 20) |
trunk1 | 4 | 3 (75%) | 30 | 23 (75% x 30) |
Total score: 74 |
In this example, the total HA score for traffic-group-1 on Bigip_B is currently 74. If this score is currently the highest score in the device group for traffic-group-1, then traffic-group-1 will automatically failover and become active on Bigip_B.
About matching HA health scores
In rare cases, the BIG-IP® system might calculate that two or more traffic groups have the same HA score. In this case, the BIG-IP system needs an additional method for choosing the next-active device for an active traffic group.
The way that the BIG-IP system chooses the next-active device when HA health scores match is by determining the management IP address of each matching device and then calculating a score based on the highest management IP address of those devices.
For example, if Bigip_A has an IP address of 192.168.20.11 and Bigip_B has an IP address of 192.168.20.12, and their HA scores match, the BIG-IP system calculates a score based on the address 192.168.20.12.
About using a preferred device order list to pick the next-active device
A Preferred Device Order list is a static list of devices that you can assign to a floating traffic group as a way for the BIG-IP ®system to choose the next-active device. The list tells the BIG-IP system the order to use when deciding which device to designate as the next-active device for the traffic group.
You create a preferred device order list by configuring the traffic group's Failover Method setting and choosing Failover using Preferred Device Order and then Load Aware. For example, for traffic-group-1, if you create a list that contains devices BIG-IP A, BIG-IP B, and BIG-IP C, in that order, the system checks to see if BIG-IP A is up and if so, designates BIG-IP A as the target device for traffic-group-1. If the system sees that BIG-IP A is down, it checks BIG-IP B to see if it's up, and if so, designates BIG-IP B as the target failover device for the traffic group, and so on.
If you assigned an HA group to the traffic group, the BIG-IP system not only selects the next-active device by checking to see if a device in the list is up, but also whether the device's trunk, pool, or cluster resources meet the minimum criteria defined in the HA group. In this case, if a device's resources don't meet the minimum criteria (and therefore it's HA score is zero), the system will not designate that device as the next-active device and will check the next device in the list.
If the preferred device order list is empty or if none of the devices in the list is available, the BIG-IP system switches to using the load-aware failover method to choose the next-active device.
About auto-failback
The failover feature includes an option known as auto-failback. When you enable auto-failback, a traffic group that has failed over to another device fails back to a preferred device when that device is available. If you do not enable auto-failback for a traffic group, and the traffic group fails over to another device, the traffic group remains active on the new device until that device becomes unavailable.
You can enable auto-failback on a traffic group only when you have configured an ordered list with at least one entry, for that traffic group. In this case, if auto-failback is enabled and the traffic group has failed over to another device, then the traffic group fails back to the first device in the traffic group's ordered list (the preferred device) when that device becomes available.
If a traffic group fails over to another device, and the new device fails before the auto-failback timeout period has expired, the traffic group will still fail back, to the original device if available. The maximum allowed timeout value for auto-failback is 300 seconds.
Creating an HA ordered list
About using traffic load to pick the next-active device
If you want the BIG-IP® system to base the next-active selection for a traffic group on application traffic load, you can use load-aware failover. Load-aware failover ensures that the traffic load on all devices in a device group is as equivalent as possible, factoring in any differences in the amount of application traffic that traffic groups process on a device. The load-aware configuration option is most useful for device groups with varying application traffic loads.
The BIG-IP system implements load-aware failover by calculating a utilization score for each device, based on numeric values that you specify for each traffic group relative to the other traffic groups in the device group. The system then uses this current score to determine which device is the best device in the group to become the next-active device when failover occurs for a traffic group.
About device utilization calculation
The BIG-IP® system on each device performs a calculation to determine the device's current level of utilization. This utilization level indicates the ability for the device to be the next-active device in the event that an active traffic group on another device must fail over within a device group.
The calculation that the BIG-IP performs to determine the current utilization of a device is based on these factors:
- Active local traffic groups
- The number of active traffic groups on the local device.
- Active remote traffic groups
- The number of remote active traffic groups for which the local device is the next-active device.
- A load factor for each active traffic group
- A multiplier value for each traffic group. The system uses this value to weight each active traffic group's traffic load compared to the traffic load of each of the other active traffic groups in the device group.
The BIG-IP system uses all of these factors to perform a calculation to determine, at any particular moment, a score for each device that represents the current utilization of that device. This utilization score indicates whether the BIG-IP system should, in its attempt to equalize traffic load on all devices, designate the device as a next-active device for an active traffic group on another device in the device group.
About the HA load factor
For each traffic group on a BIG-IP® device, you can assign an high availability (HA) load factor. An HA load factor is a number that represents the relative application traffic load that an active traffic group processes compared to other active traffic groups in the device group.
For example, if the device group has two active traffic groups, and one traffic group processes twice the amount of application traffic as the other, then you can assign values of 4 and 2, respectively. You can assign any number for the HA load factor, as long as the number reflects the traffic group's relative load compared to the other active traffic groups.
About metrics for the HA load factor
User-specified values for the HA load factor can be based on different metrics. For example, suppose you have the three devices Bigip_A, Bigip_B, and Bigip_C, and each device has one active traffic group with an HA load factor of 2, 4, or 8 respectively. These values could indicate either of the following:
- If each traffic group contains one virtual address, then the sample factor values could indicate that the virtual server for Bigip_B processes twice the amount of traffic as that of Bigip_A, and the virtual server for Bigip_C processes twice the amount of traffic as that of Bigip_B.
- If the traffic group on Bigip_A contains one virtual address, the traffic group on Bigip_B contains two virtual addresses, and the traffic group on Bigip_C contains four virtual addresses, this could indicate that the virtual servers corresponding to those virtual addresses each process the same amount of traffic compared to the others.
Specifying an HA load factor for a traffic group
About MAC masquerade addresses
A MAC masquerade address is a unique, floating Media Access Control (MAC) address that you create and control. You can assign one MAC masquerade address to each traffic group on a BIG-IP® device. By assigning a MAC masquerade address to a traffic group, you indirectly associate that address with any floating IP addresses (services) associated with that traffic group. With a MAC masquerade address per traffic group, a single VLAN can potentially carry traffic and services for multiple traffic groups, with each service having its own MAC masquerade address.
A primary purpose of a MAC masquerade address is to minimize ARP communications or dropped packets as a result of a failover event. A MAC masquerade address ensures that any traffic destined for the relevant traffic group reaches an available device after failover has occurred, because the MAC masquerade address floats to the available device along with the traffic group. Without a MAC masquerade address, on failover the sending host must relearn the MAC address for the newly-active device, either by sending an ARP request for the IP address for the traffic or by relying on the gratuitous ARP from the newly-active device to refresh its stale ARP entry.
The assignment of a MAC masquerade address to a traffic group is optional. Also, there is no requirement for a MAC masquerade address to reside in the same MAC address space as that of the BIG-IP device.