Specifications

Virtual servers
BIG-IP® Reference Guide 4-75
For example, the following commands define two wildcard virtual servers,
the first for VLAN internal, and the second for VLAN external:
b virtual internal use pool my_pool
b virtual external use pool my_pool
Network virtual servers
You can configure a network virtual server to handle a whole network
range, instead of just one IP address, or all IP addresses (a wildcard virtual
server). For example, the virtual server in Figure 4.40 handles all traffic
addresses in the 192.168.1.0 network.
A network virtual server is a virtual server that has no bits set in the host
portion of the IP address. The example above directs all traffic destined to
the subnet 192.168.1.0/24 through the BIG-IP to the ingress_firewalls pool.
The netmask of a network virtual server establishes which portion of the
address is actually the network of a network virtual server. By default, this is
the netmask of the self IP address. In the example, the network mask of
255.255.255.0 states that the network portion of the address is 192.168.1,
which in this case is obvious because only the last octet has a zero value.
A less obvious case would be the network virtual server 10.0.0.0:0. Here,
the zero in the second octet is ambiguous: it could be a wildcard or it could
be a literal zero. If it is a wildcard, this would be established by a netmask of
255.0.0.0. If it is a literal zero, this would be established by a netmask of
255.255.0.0.
Another way you can use this feature is to create a catch-all web server for
an entire subnet. For example, you could create the following network
virtual server, shown in Figure 4.41.
This configuration directs a web connection destined to any address within
the subnet 192.168.1.0/24 to the default_webservers pool.
bigpipe virtual 192.168.1.0:0 {
netmask 255.255.255.0 use pool ingress_firewalls
}
Figure 4.40 A sample network virtual server
bigpipe virtual 192.168.1.0:http {
netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255
use pool default_webservers
}
Figure 4.41 A catch-all web server configuration.