F5 DevOps Libraries – Simplify BIG-IP Provisioning, Reset, and HA Pairing

We are pleased to announce availability of new lightweight DevOps Libraries designed to simplify automated provisioning, factory resetting, and basic HA clustering of BIG-IPs, both physical and virtual. Delivered as iApps LX RPMs, these libraries enable you to map multiple API calls to a single REST call, thus significantly reducing complexity associated with provisioning, reset, and basic clustering. The RPMs can be installed on BIG-IP without the need for any client-side install.

Provisioning Library

You can use this DevOps package to setup or reset a BIG-IP. The package can configure the BIG-IP’s hostname, NTP servers and timezone, DNS servers and search domain, and syslog servers. You can setup a new BIG-IP configuration by providing initial values for the managed settings. You can also restore all the properties managed by the DevOps package back to their factory defaults.

f5-rest-devops-settings RPM

• Provision BIG-IP device
• NTP servers & timezone
• Licensing BIG-IP using single registration key, supports BYOL
• Syslog server
• FQDN
• Device name
• DNS search domain list
• Factory Reset BIG-IP Device
• Factory reset via standard iControl REST API
• Eliminates all data plane configuration, device trust, and system settings
• Management IP and licenses are not reset

Clustering Library

You can use this package to create a Device Services Clustering (DSC) cluster from two BIG-IPs. The package must be deployed on one of the BIG-IPs that will become a member of the cluster. When you deploy this package, it creates and modifies configuration objects such as VLANs and self-IPs, adds the remote BIG-IP to the trust group of the first BIG-IP and creates a failover group that includes both devices. After the deployment has finished, the cluster is fully operational.

 f5-rest-devops-dsc RPM

• Provision a basic BIG-IP HA pair
• 2 device Active/Standby cluster
• Single default traffic group
• Automatic cluster synchronization (CMI)
• Creation of vLAN and self-IP for HA sync

Further information is available in the newly available DevOps wiki, which will be expanded as new tools are released.

Note: These tools are are provided via DevCentral as free tools to help you simplify key BIG-IP automation tasks and is not officially supported by F5 or F5 Professional Services. All support questions or comments must be submitted in the article comments below, or addressed in either of the specific library’s comments in the downloads section of the website.