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Forum Discussion

Herman2024's avatar
Herman2024
Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
Jan 13, 2025

What is the best practice for migrating from iseries to rseries?

hi ,we plan to migrate to new r-series F5 (v15.1.x) from i-series  legacy appliance v13.x.x. We will create the same vlans and IP address config, but the physical interfaces will be different. The ne...
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Sebastiansierra's avatar
Sebastiansierra
Icon for MVP rankMVP
Jan 13, 2025

Hi Herman2024,

 

For me, the best migration strategy is:

  1. Upgrade the i-series to v15.1.x, in this case, you could set offline one of the current devices and create a cluster with the new r-series device, make a failover, and test the services "it only applies if APM is not provisioned"
  2. If APM is provisioned you have two options:
    1. Big bang - migrate the configs into new devices " I recommend updating the i-seres to avoid possible issues in the config migration", so in this case, you have to disable the current devices and then enable the new devices "at the SW level is the best option because you can configure the HA between the devices only provisioning the vlan for this propose but you have to replace the current IPs in the config"
    2. Migrate by services with a different networking config - In this case, the idea is migrating by group of services or VIPs, you have to keep a different network configuration, and in the new devices you have to disable the ARP, for VIPs and SNAT and the migration is easy, you have to disable ARP in the current devices for a group of services and enable in the new devices.

Note: If your current i-series can´t be upgraded because the support contract is over, you could contact your F5 SE to request a temporary license to upgrade the devices. 

I hope it works.

 

  • Herman2024's avatar
    Herman2024
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Jan 13, 2025

    Thanks Sebastiansierra for your kind advice! we don't want to upgrade software to 15.1.x on the i-series first because of the impact to the production. Can we directly upload the v13.1.x UCS file (i-series) onto r-series (OS version is 15.1.x)?  APM module is  not provisioned.  Thanks in advance!

    • Sebastiansierra's avatar
      Sebastiansierra
      Icon for MVP rankMVP
      Jan 13, 2025

      Hi Herman2024,

       

      If you don´t want to affect production in this migration, I recommend you upgrade the current devices from version 13 to 15 and then upload the new UCS in the r-series devices. There are many changes from 13 to 15, and the configuration is transformed in the upgrade process, so no, I don't recommend you try to load the UCS from 13 to 15; it will probably fails.

      You could try to use the platform to migrate in the load, but again, the most probably is that the load fails.

      https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K82540512

       

      • Herman2024's avatar
        Herman2024
        Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
        Jan 14, 2025

        Hi Sebastiansierra , 

        thank you so much for your advice. Our current f5 i-series is very old unit and we don't prefer to upgrade it to 15.1.x from 13.1.x . Can we downgrade r-series OS from 15.1 to 13.1 ,then upload the UCS of i-series onto it, finally upgrade OS on r-series to 15.1? Please advise, thanks !

    • MikePollock's avatar
      MikePollock
      Icon for Altocumulus rankAltocumulus
      Jan 27, 2025

      Version 15.1.x is the absolute minimum supported on rSeries, so you will have to upgrade first.  You'll want to use "Journeys" to generate a compatible UCS file for the migration.  It'll run through all the issues you need to resolve as well.