v10 upgrade and impact to iRules

Hi SMP,

 

 

For most customers, we try to do an upgrade of a test unit from 9.x to the specific 10.x version they want to use in production. They then do a full regression test of each application that uses iRules. If you have a test unit, this is the route I'd suggest. Else, maybe you could get an eval unit for a few weeks from F5 or a partner to do this. LTM VE could be a way to do specific tests if you're planning on upgrading to 10.1, but it seems like there are too many differences in functionality between a physical appliance and VE to use it for full regression testing.

 

 

If you don't have the option for using a test unit to try the upgrade, I'd try to schedule as long a maintenance window as you can get and then use a partition installation for 10.x and keep the 9.x instance. You could then fail over to the 10.x unit, test the applications and have a fall back to the peer unit and the option of switchbooting back to the 9.x slot.

 

 

The biggest issues I've seen with upgrades involve the change to datagroup access. In v10.x, you can no longer access datagroups as TCL lists. 'class get' or 'class element' should provide similar functionality though. The syntax checking in v10 is also more strict. All datagroups must exist before an iRule referencing a datagroup. Also, in v10, you can avoid breaking CMP by replacing unchanging global variables using the static:: namespace. This assumes you're on a platform that supports CMP. For more info see this page: http://devcentral.f5.com/Wiki/default.aspx/iRules/CMPCompatibility.html

 

 

Aaron