Getting Started with BIG-IP Next: Upgrading Central Manager

Upgrades are one of the major improvements in moving from BIG-IP classic to Next. Whereas there is no direct analog for Central Manager in BIG-IP classic, the improvements from the BIG-IP/BIG-IQ upgrade experience will be noticeable. Simplification is the goal, and in my first Central Manager upgrade experience, I'd say that bar has been reached. In this article, I'll walk you through performing an upgrade to a standalone Central Manager. When HA for Central Manager is released, I'll update this article with those details. The installation steps on Clouddocs (links in the resources at the end of this article) make note that you should upgrade your instances before Central Manager, so keep that in mind as you build out your procedure sets for BIG-IP Next operations. For production I'd also recommend taking a backup of Central Manager as well (I'll do a walkthrough of that process in the coming weeks) but for discovery on my BIG-IP Next journey, I'll skip that step and nuke/pave if I have an issue.

The first step in the upgrade process is to download the BIG-IP Next Central Manager upgrade package.

After you have the upgraded package, login to your Central Manager. Click in the upper left on the tic-tac-toe board.

Then in the dropdown menu that appears, select the System option.

There's only one option here currently, and that's the upgrade button. Go ahead and click it.

There will be a couple notes on the new window about resources and information on the unavailability to perform tasks during the upgrade. Go ahead and click next.

If you didn't grab the package yet, the link to do so is included on this menu page. I selected the upload file option, selected the package from my downloads, and uploaded the file. You'll get the "green means go" checkbox when it's ready, at which point you can click the upgrade button.

On the "Are you sure?" alert dialog, go ahead and click yes, upgrade.

At this point, the upgrade will begin. On my upgrade, session was grayed out and I could not interact with the Central Manager interface, so my session timed out.