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rjordan's avatar
rjordan
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Mar 04, 2013

Migrating to new LB pair

About a year ago I migrated our LTM from an old 3400 pair to the 6900 pair. We were running 9.x on the 3400s and 10.x on the 6900s. I exported an SCF from the old pair and made a handful of changes before importing it into the new pair. This was a very smooth process for us.

 

Now we require 10g interfaces so we purchased a pair of 4200v. They are running 11.2.1 (first release supporting this platform). I was hoping to do a similar migration/upgrade using SCF. I created an SCF from the 4200v after I configured basic management settings. It seems all the objects have a different format. We have about 600 VS, 300 pools, 60 VLANs, etc, so it will be pretty nasty converting everything to the 11.x SCF format.

 

Has anyone put time into converting SCF between v10 and v11?

 

I'm wondering if I should just plan on upgrading our production 6900 to 11.2.1, then do a more standard SCF migration to the 4200s. I checked the release notes for 11.2.1 and it says it can be upgraded from any 10.x, so it doesn't look like I need to be on the latest 10.x release.

 

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  • rjordan's avatar
    rjordan
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Apr 18, 2014

    Version 10 isn't supported on the 4200v: Compatibility Matrix. I don't know if that means you can't run version 10 at all. I guess its worth a try.

     

    Then use a test appliance like the 3600 or even a VE lab to run the upgrade. Export the config from the test appliance and import into the 4000s. I did the config imports by adjusting bigip.conf and bipip_base.conf files as this was more comfortable for me.

     

    A couple things to look out for: 1. Configure management, device trust/HA on the 4000s pair. 2. When importing configs between different hardware, pay close attention to the stuff in bigip_base.conf. I had to tweak the interfaces, trunks and rip out the failover stuff before I could import into the lab appliance. 3. Once the lab device is upgraded to v11, you'll have to tweak the bigip_base.conf file again before importing into the 4000s. 4. When importing certificates, you should skip a few. I think I skipped the default, f5 and ca-bundle files.

     

    • opediggitty_692's avatar
      opediggitty_692
      Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
      Apr 18, 2014
      This is why I went with the spare 3600 route (if you have one available or from your SE) in order to migrate your config to and upgrade it with the new version of software and let it upgrade the config in the process since it is in the family of devices (circa 2007-2011ish) that will run both 10.x and 11.x code no problem. The 1500's and 6400's that I am trying to upgrade can only run the 9.x or 10.x, save the 6400's which will actually let you install 11.1 but can go no further. This at least let's you get the 11.x code on the box to then be upgraded easier.
  • nitass's avatar
    nitass
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    Apr 18, 2014

    Version 10 isn't supported on the 4200v: Compatibility Matrix. I don't know if that means you can't run version 10 at all. I guess its worth a try.

     

    4200v cannot run 10.x code.