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Ray_Hsieh's avatar
Ray_Hsieh
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Sep 11, 2013

iRule compatible from verion 9 to verion 11

We're going to upgrade the BIG-IP LTM from verion 9.4.8 to version 11.1.0. But we have concerned whether the iRule syntax is compatible between v9 and v11. Do we have any knowledge base for convertin...
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Kevin_Stewart's avatar
Kevin_Stewart
Icon for Employee rankEmployee
Sep 11, 2013

I think the best thing is to point you to the following documents:

 

iRules: BIG-IP LTM v10.0.0

 

iRules: BIG-IP LTM v11.0.0

 

These two pages will show you the major differences from 9 to 10 and from 10 to 11 (where the most changes happen from 9 to 10). There are quite a few things on these lists, but easily the 3 most common ones are:

 

  1. Global variables - newer platforms support a multi-processor architecture called "CMP" (like SMP but without much of the thread management overhead). With CMP, variables are generally stored in one core (tmm) during processing - other cores are off doing other things. Prior to v10 if you set a global variable (::var syntax), it'd be accessible to the entire box. With CMP however, that wouldn't be the case. So the new "static::" namespace creates global variables that are CMP-compatible. In v10 you can still create old-style global variables, but they'll instantly demote the system to a single core.

     

  2. Matchclass and findclass - these are almost completely deprecated in favor of the new "class" namespace. Same function but different syntax and considerably more flexibility.

     

  3. Tables - the table namespace is a CMP-compatible extension to the old "session" command. The session command is still around, but it's rather dull compared to what you can do with tables.

     

You'll need to upgrade from 9.4.8 to 10 before going to 11, so I recommend finessing your iRules in v10 while you're there. If you follow the above guidelines you should be good to go in v11.