HA with different versions

Running HA with different versions isn't supported. Any issues you're seeking to work around by doing this is going to be outweighed by any issues you experience doing this.

 

With BigIP you have multiple boot slots. So just upgrade to 12.1 and have 11.6 available in a DR slot. Fallback is as easy as a reboot.

 

Your other option is to disable HA and just run 2x standalone systems. One at 11.6 and one at 12.1 then write a quick script to enable/disable the VS's and do manual up/down on each unit.

 

We started by doing force offline to the STB machine.

 

After rebooting the the standby machine to the new partition,

 

The 2nd machine went disconnected and the 1st machine went disconnected and in standby mode.

 

This caused network to stop working.

 

We had to breake the cluster and investigate the root cause of the issue

 

1st issue was that the 11.6 configuration had warnings and errors which did not comply with with ver.12.1.1

 

1. We had a LTM policy to forward traffic to a member - we needed to change the member to node since member is not supported.

 

2. LTM policy to change http to https with this regex was not supported - location "https://[getfield [http::host] \":\" 1] [http::uri]"

 

After fixing these errors the configuration loaded.

 

However, we did not have the APM fully working, a message showed us that a another reboot is required.

 

After reboot, the APM came up correctly.

 

After that, ASM did not work with error:

 

 

Dec 4 18:36:38 BOX2 crit perl[12256]: 01310027:2: ASM subsystem error (asm_start,F5::DbUtils::insert_data_to_table): Row of table PLC.PL_COOKIE_NEGSIG_SIGNATURES is missing sig_id (200001067) -- skipping F5::ImportExportPolicy::Binary

 

Dec 4 18:36:38 BOX2 crit perl[12256]: 01310027:2: ASM subsystem error (asm_start,F5::DbUtils::insert_data_to_table): Row of table PLC.PL_COOKIE_NEGSIG_SIGNATURES is missing sig_id (200001067) -- skipping F5::ImportExportPolicy::Binary

 

 

Running: mysql -u root -p$(perl -MPassCrypt -nle 'print PassCrypt::decrypt_password($_)' /var/db/mysqlpw) -e 'DELETE FROM PLC.PL_COOKIE_NEGSIG_SIGNATURES

 

Fixed the issue and after running bigstart start asm it was OK.

 

 

After that, on the 1st machine (with older version) we did force offline and on the 2nd machine (with the newer ver.) we did release offline

 

After a few minutes when everyhting start working, we did a complete test and it seems to be working good.

 

 

 

The current situation:

 

1. No cluster!

 

2. Active is 12.1.1 - standalone

 

3. Standby is 11.6 - forced offline

 

 

Next steps:

 

1. Upgrade the other box from 11.6 to 12.1.1 next week

 

2. Rebuild the cluster

 

 

 

Although the upgrade did not go as planned it looks like the new version is working fine for now.

 

 

In future upgrades I thing the conifsync should be disabled to prevent automatic failover and network issues until the manual flipping.

 

 

Regards,

 

 

I have the same question. Did you already read this:

 

for me it sounds like we need to try it out and only somebody running the exact same versions and who already did it can say for sure if it is working or not.