Farm Element Wiring Rules

This section describes elements and rules for wiring elements in your farm. Consider the following information when connecting elements in the Control Center.

• External Subnet. Represents the external, publicly addressable sub network. Public IP addresses are allocated during activation. All allocated IP addresses are visible externally on the Internet. The maximum number of IP addresses on the external subnet connection is 2048. Six IP addresses are reserved. The default number is 16 in the Control Center. If more wiring connections are needed, click the + symbol to add connections to the Subnet. See How To Configure the External Subnet and How To Add a VLAN Configuration for configuration instructions.

• Internal Subnet. Represents a private sub network within the farm. IP addresses are allocated during activation. Allocated IP addresses are private and visible internally only. All internal subnets have a fixed mask length of 24 (a netmask of 255.255.255.0). The internal subnets can have a maximum of 253 devices connected to them. Although a 24 mask length has a capacity of 256 IP addresses, three addresses are reserved. Multiple subnets may be configured within the same VLAN. If more wiring connections are needed, click the + symbol to add connections to the Subnet . See Configuring the Subnet for configuration instructions.

• Server. Represents a server or a server group. The upper interface is the eth0 interface. A connection to the upper port (eth0) is required. The primary ports (eth0 and eth1) cannot be deleted from the server group. The VLAN of the subnet to which primary ports are connected is the native VLAN for the primary port. See Configuring Servers and Server Groups. Virtual interfaces may be added to servers or server groups. You may configure up to 16 virtual interfaces for each primary port on a server. See Configuring Virtual Interfaces.

• Load Balancer. Represents a load balancer. Balances traffic sent to a virtual interface and redirects the traffic to a real interface to spread large amounts of traffic over multiple servers. The upper port (eth0) is the virtual interface. The lower port is eth1. A connection to the lower port (eth1) is optional. The yellow port represents VIPs. The green port represents a management interface. One green port appears for each physical interface on the load balancer. The load balancer may balance traffic to any devices that have at least one interface on the same subnet as one of the management interfaces. Additional VIPs may be added by using the Configure Load Balancer dialog box. See How To Configure the Load Balancer andHow To Configure a Load Balancer in Path Failover Mode for procedural instructions.

• Ethernet Port. The Ethernet Port element represents connectivity to a device that is not under direct management of the Control Center software. Use the Ethernet Port element to connect to gateway devices, management networks, or devices that are not supported by the software. You might use the Ethernet Port element to represent VPNs, backhaul routers, backup networks, monitoring networks, or firewalls. A connection to the port (eth0) is required. See Configuring Unmanaged Devices for procedural information.