Getting Started with BIG-IP Next: Upgrading Instances

Upgrades are one of the major improvements in moving from BIG-IP classic to Next. You no longer need to think about boot locations and carrying configurations forward from the current boot slots, and if you're upgrading an HA pair, which I did in capturing the screenshots for this article, you don't even need to plan your failovers if you don't want to manage that. Once you kick off the upgrade, the standby instance will be upgraded, then the standby becomes active (if automatic failover was selected) and then the newly standby/formerly active unit is upgraded. Easy button!

In this article, I walk you through performing an upgrade on an HA pair, but other than a single step (for automatic failover), the process is the same as with an standalone system, and those differences are mentioned. The installation steps on Clouddocs (links in the resources at the end of this article) make note that instances should be upgraded 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 your instances as well (and 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 instance upgrade package.

Next, download the signature for the instance upgrade package.

Log into Central Manager, select an instance, and then on the actions drop down select upgrade.

Because I selected an HA pair, I see the screen below giving me the option to disable automatic failover (enabled by default) and to force a failover if I want to upgrade the active node first. I chose the defaults here and selected upgrade.

If you are upgrading a standalone, the previous step is skipped and you are asked to upload the image and signature files. Select and upload the files, and when you have the "green is good" notifications, select upgrade.

At the dialog that pops up, select yes, upgrade.

At this point, you can exit out to your instance list and you'll see the upgrade process in the list.

There is a brief state where I saw both of the instances in the HA pair in the listing during failover as shown below.

After both instances have been updated, you should see the new version in the listing and a healthy state!

I did capture the states of the upgrade that printed to the instance during one of standalone instances I upgraded. They are shown in the gif below.

Resources

• Upgrading a standalone VE instance
• Upgrading a VE HA pair with manual failover
• Upgrading a VE HA pair with automatic failover

There are upgrade guides for rSeries and VELOS as well on the BIG-IP Next Clouddocs documentation site.