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Kraig_52305's avatar
Kraig_52305
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
May 14, 2012

List Config and VIPs With iControl

I have a user that only has read access to F5 LTM's V10 and V11. They would like to pull the full bigip.conf files from 35 load balancers for historical reference and would like a quick way to find what load balancers a VIP is located on. The user could login into every box and do a b virtual but I would like to find an easier way.

 

 

I am open for suggestions but I am wondering two things:

 

 

1. Could iControl be used to pull the configs down to a local file for historical purposes?

 

 

2. Could iControl be used as well to list current VIPs of all 35 load balancers?

 

 

I am completely unfamiliar with iControl and don’t have much scripting experience so I am looking for something fairly easy to deploy.

 

 

Kraig
dev
devops
iControl
  • snovakov_86258's avatar
    snovakov_86258
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    May 14, 2012

    Kraig,

     

    Welcome to the 'iControl' world!

     

    Yes, repetitive and mundane tasks like this are easily automated using 'iControl' API.

     

    Look at the documentation associated with your particular version, etc.

     

    For example, I'm using 'iControl' v10.2.0 and would use the following 'iControl' API method to retrieve a file from an appliance:

     

    System.ConfigSync.download_file()

     

    To get a system's complete list of VIPs I would use the:

     

    LocalLB.VirtualAddress.get_list()

     

     

    method.

     

     

    This method returns an array of String of virtual IP addresses on the targeted appliance.

     

     

    ~ Steven

     

     

  • smp_86112's avatar
    smp_86112
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    May 15, 2012
    Hi Kraig. If you don't have much scripting experience, you may have to overcome a pretty steep learning curve. iControl supports Visual Basic .NET, Visual C .NET, Java, and Perl - which language did you plan on using?

     

  • dbizzle_20930's avatar
    dbizzle_20930
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Aug 01, 2012
    sounds like a job for enterprise manager, honestly with that many F5's EM would help out alot i think..

     

     

    course, there are other ways of determining this type of info without scripting or EM. If both the VIPs and the F5s have hostnames that are resolved by your local DNS, you can always just use trace route to find out what device a particular VIP lives on.