In the diagram above, neither of the flows have the LoadMaster as the default gateway. To be transparent, the default gateway of the Real Servers must be the LoadMaster. This is true whether the network configuration is one-armed or two-armed.

If the LoadMaster is not the default gateway, there is no way to ensure that traffic passes back through the LoadMaster on the way from the server to the client.

If transparency is enabled and the LoadMaster is not the default gateway, the traffic flows in the following order:

  1. Client to VS
  2. VS to Real Server
  3. Real Server to network default gateway
  4. Network default gateway to client

The connection fails between the Real Server and network default gateway. This is due to asymmetric routing. The client gets a response from the default gateway and drops the connection because it expected a reply from the LoadMaster.