If you are deploying applications in a large number of sites where you would like to direct users to the clients available server, you can add sub-regions and map the sub-regions to IP address ranges.
When you configure an application in GSS, you configure answers and search order for your regular answers and client regions, not sub-regions. Sub-regions are associated with IP address ranges that are not specific to applications, and can affect any application with multiple IP addresses.
When you configure sub-regions and associate them with IP address spaces, this affects the order of answers in responses returned to the clients. The response includes the IP addresses of all available application servers in the configured client but where the IP address of the client is in the same sub-region as one or more of the IP addresses in the answer, the IP addresses in the same region will be listed first in the DNS response. Most applications use the first IP address returned by the DNS server and will connect to the closest available server.
The GSS regions and sub-regions are defined using Tag objects in Address Manager. During the installation of the GSS workflow, the Traffic Steering tag group is created and used for storing GSS configuration information. It also contains a hierarchy of Tag objects created within the group.
- Log in to Address Manager as an administrator.
- Select the Groups tab.
- Under Tag Groups, click Traffic Steering.
- Under Traffic Steering, click Regions.
- Under Regions, click the GSS region where you want to add the sub-regions.
- Create a new Tag for each GSS sub-region, where the Tag name is the sub-region name.
Assigning GSS regions and sub-regions to an IP address space
GSS regions and sub-regions are associated with an IP address space by linking IP blocks and IP networks to the sub-region tag.
- Builds the ACL for the matching-clients statement on a DNS view that has been created for a GSS client region.
- Automatically selects an Answer region when adding answers to an application configuration in GSS.
- Builds the sortlist options that control the order of answers in DNS responses that contain multiple IP addresses
- Log in to Address Manager as a user with Change access.
- Select the IP Space tab.
- Select the IP blocks or IP networks that you would like to add a region or sub-region to.
- Click Action and select Tag.
- Under Tags, click Select Tag.
- Click and select the region or sub-region.
- Click Add.
- Check the list of Objects to Tag and click Apply.