Standalone to HA active/passive pair - best practices?

Hi Brad,

 

 

You can steal some steps from SOL8086:

 

 

SOL8086: Replacing a BIG-IP system in a redundant pair without interrupting service

 

http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/8000/000/sol8086.html

 

 

Basically:

 

 

The virtual server addresses on the existing active unit should not need to be changed. You can set the unit to a member of an active/standby pair under System | Platform. You can then add floating self IP addresses on any VLAN that will be used to accept routed traffic on.

 

 

Then for the new unit:

 

 

Connect the hardwire failover cable to the new unit.

 

Connect the mgmt cable to the new unit.

 

Power it up.

 

Run the config script from the CLI to set the hostname and management IP.

 

Once you can connect via the GUI, you can configure the base config (VLANs, static self IPs, etc).

 

 

You can then copy a UCS from the existing unit to the new one via the management port and load it (b config save my.ucs / b config install my.ucs). Only the shared config should load. Once that completes successfully, you can plug in the network cables. Make sure the new unit can successfully monitor the pool members (ie, there aren't any firewall rules which need to be changed) before making it active. During a maintenance window, you can fail over to the new unit and test major functionality through the unit.

 

 

F5 Support should be able to confirm these steps.

 

 

Aaron