I'm trying to implement Direct Server Return scheme for our web cluster and I think i got stuck with some ARP issues. For testing purposes I deployed 2 virtual servers (inside ESXi environment).
Host A: eth0 10.0.0.1/24 (VIP) is our director with its virtual ip on eth0
Host B: eth0 10.0.0.2/24, lo:0 10.0.0.1/32 is one of the webapp nodes, which runs httpd daemon
These two servers are on the same ethernet segment. As you can see host B has its loopback interface aliased to hold the VIP (10.0.0.1). In order for server B not to reply to VIP arp filtering is implemented via arptables:
arptables -A IN -d 10.0.0.1 -j DROP arptables -A OUT -s 10.0.0.1 -j mangle --mangle-ip-s 10.0.0.2
Everything seemed good so far until i tried to ping host B from host A. "Destination host Unreachable" is what i got. By running tcpdump on host B i discovered that it did receive ARP requests from host A, but didn't send replies. Meanwhile ARP requests from other nodes we successfully replied by host B. So it looks like host A can't communicate with another machine, holding its VIP. Even though i did arp filtering. This is weird for me actually.
Any suggestions?
Btw i'm running Centos 6.