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Daniel_55334's avatar
Daniel_55334
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Mar 29, 2008

Creating VS in a fast way

I need to create several hundreds of VS. Every time I create a VS I need to select a pool. However I got 600 pools and they are not sorted in any means in the dropdown menu. So I need to scroll over all pools before I can find the one I need. Is there any smarter way to do this? This saves me a lot of time. Thanks.

5 Replies

  • If the GUI isn't exactly how you need it to work, you can always write your own by using iControl. iControl is built for exactly this purpose: automating the management of objects on the system. If you need to create hundreds of virtuals, you can create a perl script or .Net or Java application to do it for you. If you haven't written an iControl application before, let me know some specifics and what language you prefer and I'll see if I can help with a boilerplate sample to start with.

     

     

    -Joe
  • Oh, one other option if you don't want to go the programming route would be to script the creation of the virtuals on the BIG-IP command line with the bigpipe command. You can build a script that issues bigpipe commands to create the virtuals.

     

     

    Either way should work fine for bulk creation.

     

     

    -Joe
  • Deb_Allen_18's avatar
    Deb_Allen_18
    Historic F5 Account

    Looks like that was fixed under CR77950 as of LTM v9.4.1. Trying to find a pool by name in a non-ordered list of hundreds of entries was a real usability issue that was pointed out by a number of our customers who create VS manually, so we fixed it. Both pools and http classes will be listed in alpha order now. If you can upgrade, that's probably easiest.

    If you can't upgrade yet, Joe's suggestion to use the bigpipe command is one way around that even if you're creating only 1 VS at a time.

    The syntax for that is:
    b virtual my_virtual {dest 192.168.12.11:80 pool my_pool persist source_addr profiles tcp http}
    and you can get more help at the command line by running

    b virtual help

    hth

    /deb

  • Thanks for all reply, joe and deb. However, does F5 not suggest to make configuration changes using CLI in v9? I read through many manuals for v9 and not even a single command is mentioned.
  • There is a CLI guide that is published separately now. CLI changes are very much still supported.