Forum Discussion
NimbostratusP2V Big-IP Migration
I'm currently working on migrating two physical Big-IP LTMs to two VEs. I was wondering if anybody had any experience with doing this.
Some things I was wondering about specifically are:
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We're currently running 10.2.4 on our physical Big-IPs, but would like to end up on 11.6.1 on the VEs. Would we need to upgrade our hardware to 11.6.1 before migrating the configuration?
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We're hoping to avoid rebuilding our configuration by using the archive (.UCS) feature to drop the configuration from the physical Big-IPs to the VEs. Are there any gotchas / issues to be aware of when trying to do this?
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Is there any benefit or need to use more than one vNIC for traffic? Our throughput is pretty low ~320Mbps at peak, and our connection peaks are also fairly low. Are there any nuances here I should look into? For example connection limit per vNIC.
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Is there any F5 documentation on best practices for a P2V migration?
5 Replies
What platform is your physical BIG-IP?
It should be possible to load a older UCS on a newer software using the no-license and no-platform-check options in the load sys ucs command. I haven't tested extensively but it should upgrade the configuration on the fly and load it. It will report any errors as it loads.
We are using one vNIC for management type traffic over a TMM interface, and a second one for general data. This is in addition to the vNIC used by the actual management interface.
Depending on details of your case, there's a lot of great documentation on our sites:
You could start with:
BIG-IP LTM 11.6.1 Documentation https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/versions.11-6-1.html
Release Note: BIG-IP Virtual Edition 11.6.1 https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/releasenotes/product/relnote-ve-11-6-1.html
https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/versions.11-6-1.html
BIG-IP Virtual Edition Setup Guide for VMware ESXi https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/bigip-ve-setup-vmware-esxi-11-6-0.html
Virtual Edition and Supported Hypervisors Matrix https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/ve-supported-hypervisor-matrix.html
Updating a BIG-IP VE Virtual Machine https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/bigip-ve-setup-vmware-esxi-11-6-0/3.htmlunique_90319829
Before your migration, you are advised to test your setup - as for the configuration of vNICs - if you're happy with your current connection's design, you could design them in the same way in the VE. As for the limiting yourself to only one vNIC will enforce you to utilize SNAT/AutoMap features. Some of licenses provides policers of traffic which will effectively limit your throughput.
--M .
aplovich_252762Thanks for the links, currently looking through them. How would using 1vNIC force us to use SNAT/AutoMap? We're actually planning on using 3 vNICs: 1 for management, 1 for HA, and 1 for load-balancing traffic. The LB traffic vNIC is going to be hooked into a trunked port-group.- This is the case for most cloud providers that they do not allow for 802.1Q - instance's interface can only operate as untagged. If you do support Vlans on vNICs, it shouldn't create any problems.
- We run 802.1Q tags down to the VE's vNIC. Our ESXi clusters use Cisco 1KV switching, which makes this easy. Trunks (port-channels) are not supported.
