BIG-IP Migration across Heterogeneous Environments

Scope:

Nowadays, organizations increasingly use a mix of on-premises, private cloud and multi-cloud environments to gain better flexibility, reliability and cost savings. As business needs change, applications often need to move between these environments to improve scalability, performance, and innovation. Migrating applications across different platforms can be challenging.

Additionally, companies often migrate applications between cloud providers to adapt to changes in their portfolios, benefit from favourable pricing models, achieve greater scalability and flexibility, and accelerate innovation, ultimately enabling them to meet evolving user demands more effectively.

F5 BIG-IP VE greatly reduces the challenges of migration from one platform to another. By providing visibility into the application layer, reducing the risk of downtime and performance issues, and ensuring smooth and secure migration. F5 BIG-IP helps in improving the overall migration experience, keeping apps and APIs available and performant throughout the process.

Introduction:

This article explores workload migration patterns that involve moving applications across heterogeneous environments. Common migration scenarios include

Common migration scenarios include:

To migrate application workloads along with BIG-IP VE associated with it from VMWare to other platforms to meet their business requirements that suit best for the organization.
To leverage the services provided by cloud vendors such as Nutanix, IBM and Red Hat OpenShift.

F5 BIG-IP enables organizations to perform these migrations seamlessly by providing consistent application delivery and enforcing uniform security policies across all applications, independent of the underlying infrastructure or platform.

Architecture:

Migration Topology:

In this article, we are migrating the application services, existing configuration including license, IP addresses, hostnames, and other settings of BIG-IP deployed in VMware to the other BIG-IP VE’s deployed in other platforms.

Scenario 1: Migrating BIG-IP from VMWare to Nutanix

This scenario demonstrates how to migrate BIG-IP from a VMWare environment to Nutanix along with its associated application workloads. For this migration, the Juice Shop application was used as the sample workload, deployed on a web server and integrated with a BIG-IP virtual server to validate seamless application delivery during the transition.

Migration Procedure:

Deploying HA Pairs in BIG-IP VMWare
Standby-First Migration - Moving One Half of the HA Pair from VMware to Nutanix
Initiating HA Failover Across VMware and Nutanix Environments
Migrating the Juice Shop Workload
Migrating the Second Half of the HA Pair to Nutanix

For detailed migration steps and configuration instructions, please refer to the GitHub guide below.

A Complete Guide to Application Migration Across Heterogeneous Environments Using F5 BIG-IP.

Conclusion:

F5 BIG-IP acts as a unified control point for application delivery and security across on-premises and cloud environments. This consistency allows organizations to migrate applications smoothly from one platform to another without disruption, while maintaining the same security policies, performance, and visibility.