Can multiple Splunk Universal Forwarders use same NAT IP for sending data to Heavy Forwarder ?

[ekcsoc]

We have around 100 Universal Forwarders in a specific Office location A and another 50 Universal Forwarders in Office location B. We are trying to use a single NAT IP (192.168.10.20) for Office location A and a single NAT IP (192.168.10.30) for Office Location B for sending data from these Universal forwarders to a Heavy Forwarder placed in a different Office location C.

Can Splunk distinguish each Universal Forwarder with its own host IP even though its communicating and sending data to HF with a single NAT IP ?

Is this TCP Connection stream handling between the Splunk UF and Splunk HF is capable of managing the multiple TCP client connections on the same NAT IP ?

[maraman_splunk]

Hi

yes, this will work.to the limit of your nat device (probably number of different source port but that is a tcp/ip limit, not a Splunk one)
The challenge would be for communicating to Deployment Server but the Universal Forwarder use a clientname that will be different
see link text
For sending data, either to indexers or via a intermediate forwarder layer, it also doesn't matter as the data itself depend on your input configuration and will just processed independently of your nat ip.

[ekcsoc]

What do you mean by limit of your nat device ? Is that the number of connections that can be generated from NAT device ?
And one thing, we are not using deployment server in this model. Universal forwarders will be managed by the IT team with there own tools like SCCM/other tool.

Also we wanted to know the data within the logs is still matched back to the originating log source IP of the server with the Splunk UF/ or the host IP will written as NAT IP ?

[richgalloway]

While I believe it will work, I have to ask: Why are you doing this? Intermediate forwarders are discouraged because they can impede performance and are a single point of failure. Why use a single NAT IP for each location? What problem are you trying to solve?

[ekcsoc]

We are trying to achieve a multi-tenant architecture by deploying specific HF's to each office location(or each company). And regarding why a single NAT IP for each location, that is how there network architecture is build of and working