Forum Discussion
ora_68925
Nimbostratus
NimbostratusUpgrading services with no downtime
Can I upgrade the services being provided on a BIG-IP LTM without creating downtime for the client ?
I know you have to reboot after you register with a new key but what about just adding new services on top of already existing ones ? Do you still need a reboot , hence downtime , or is there a trick to work around that ?
6 Replies
hoolioCirrostratus
Hi Ora,
Are you asking about upgrading the LTM OS version? If so, do you have a redundant pair of units? If both are true, you can upgrade with a single forced reconnect of connections when you fail over to upgrade the peer unit.
If you're talking about upgrading the application being load balanced, you should be able to do this without any downtime if the application can handle sessions from the old version.
Aaron- nitass
Employee
i'm not sure but i guess u mean adding add-on feature (license).
i understand we've to either restart (bigstart restart) or reboot unit to let tmm recognize license.
so, i don't think it's possible to not having downtime. - As hoolio was saying above, nitass, it's possible if they have a redundant pair, and are able to fail traffic over from one to the other. Ideally you'd upgrade the standby unit first, verify all went well, then fail traffic over to that unit, making it the active unit. The original unit could then be upgraded, and clients shouldn't see any downtime if all goes well.
Colin 
ora_68925Well , as I remember on Linux machines if you do an update in CLI you can reboot the daemon running the service without logging out or rebooting the machine.
Can't something similar be done on F5 ?
We do have redundancy but we also have a customer who expects us to bend the laws of reality to their whim. :((- hoolioAre you asking about adding module addon keys to an existing license? For 9.x you must reboot. For 10.x you don't need to, but daemons may be restarted. Either way, I suggest activating the new license on the standby unit, failing over during a maintenance window and then activating the new license on the peer unit.
Aaron - ora_68925@aaron aka hoolio
Yes , we may need to install new services without rebooting the machines. And we do have 10.x so it will probably work. Yes I know the policy for upgrading F5 machines but our customer might consider a simple reboot of a standby unit as "downtime" - so you see my problem.
Do we have to do it in CLI or GUI ?
Is there a guide to doing something that goes completely against F5 official recommendations ?
