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Jim_Couch's avatar
Jim_Couch
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Nov 03, 2021

F5 LTM Migration

I'm beginning a project where I will be migrating some hardware appliances and VEs to a new pair of vCMP hardware appliances. If I were going like for like it would be simple because I could just make the vCMP guest an HA to the current device and push the config. However, there are several changes that make this more challenging and I am trying to determine the easiest but safest path.

 

First, I'll be collapsing two or three environments into one set of vCMP guests. We have several instances of a prod environment that I want to put into one single prod environment (for example) so that it cuts down on the number of LTMs we need to manage. I am also going to put the VIPs into a different IP subnet so the VIP will change, I will be putting these into different partitions based on the business groups that will be using them.

 

I was going to manually configure these in the new system but I am wondering if editing a BIGIP.CONF would be easier or if there is something I am not considering that might be more efficient. I'm looking at roughly 400 VIPs.

 

We only use the LTM module and there are a handful of iApps that I might need to manually configure.

 

Thanks in advance.

 

application delivery
BIG-IP
LTM
  • JRahm's avatar
    JRahm
    Icon for Admin rankAdmin
    Nov 12, 2021

    Hi Jim,

    Obviously without a deeper conversation this isn't a full endorsement of direction, but some thoughts:

    1. Are you going to be active/standby on devices, or using a cluster and using traffic groups? Keep in mind if the latter, any mirroring you do is within the traffic group without an override (which is there for a reason) so you'll want to plan for apps that might share data to be on same traffic group
    2. I'd take a look at using the AS3 Configuration Converter as a preliminary step to your work. You might not configure your new systems with a declarative model (though I recommend you consider it) but it will give you a clear understanding of your systems and where you need to focus on what has to change vs what you want to change.