Create F5 BIG-IP Next Instance on Proxmox Virtual Environment

Got my first proxmox Next instances installed, thanks for this! Some notes from my experience installing 20.3

1. For the life of me I could not get the curl command to work properly on my proxmox host. I switched to wget and used this format: wget -O <local file name> “<copied download link>”

2. As of 20.3, the Central Manager image (not that I used it, I already have CM) has the qcow2 extension already, so no need to rename

3. The tar command w/ dash as shown in the article fails, I use it without: tar xvfz <tar/zip file>

4. I cut the cpu/memory for instance way down and added a NIC:

qm create 141 --memory 8192 --sockets 1 --cores 2 --net0 virtio,bridge=vmbr0 --net1 virtio,bridge=vmbr1 --net2 virtio,bridge=vmbr2 --name pm-next-1 --scsihw=virtio-scsi-single --ostype=l26 --cpu=x86-64-v2-AES --citype nocloud --ipconfig0 ip=172.16.2.141/24,gw=172.16.2.254 --nameserver 8.8.8.8 --ciupgrade=0 --ciuser=admin --cipassword=admin  --ide2=local-lvm:cloudinit

qm set 141 --virtio0 local-lvm:0,import-from=/root/BIG-IP-Next-20.3.0-2.716.2+0.0.50.qcow2 --boot order=virtio0

5. After powering on, I pinged to make sure that was successful, then did a curl to the ip:port to make sure the instance was ready before moving on to the postman steps (the 404 is fine in this case, instance is up doing its job):

jrahm@jrahm-imac ~ % ping 172.16.2.142
PING 172.16.2.142 (172.16.2.142): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 172.16.2.142: icmp_seq=0 ttl=64 time=0.815 ms
64 bytes from 172.16.2.142: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.511 ms
^C
--- 172.16.2.142 ping statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 0.511/0.663/0.815/0.152 ms
jrahm@jrahm-imac ~ % curl -k https://172.16.2.142:5443
{"_errors":[{"id":"d0dea238-ecde-40ee-be66-632b5d829f1f","code":"13158-00028","title":"","detail":"Page not found.","status":"404"}]}

6. If you haven't done any postman work before, download (current 20.3 collection) and import both the collection and the environment into postman, then update the appropriate environment variables, save, and then make sure to set the environment in your collection. You'll also need to disable ssl verification in the postman settings.

7. Navigate to the 20.3 collection subfolder Virtual Edition Onboarding, and if you're all good through the steps above, you can run through the API calls defined to onboard. If all successful, then you can head to CM to onboard your instance there!