Last weeks episode, The Architecture Explained, drew a lot of attention. The most frequent request was for video content showing the iWorkflow interface and how the Tenants and connectors are configured (if you don’t understand those themes, take a look at Episode #1). Well, this week we’ll do precisely that and take a look at the interface. To avoid ending up with one long video I’m going to break it into two parts:

1. Install and Licensing of the iWorkflow Platform
2. Overview of the Administrative GUI and basic Setup

Acquiring a copy of iWorkflow

iWorkflow will be available for download mid-June. When released, it will be made available via https://downloads.f5.com/

NOTE: iWorkflow is not available as a hardware appliance.

 

For the purpose of this demonstration I’ll be importing the OVA image into VMware Fusion v7.1.2 on my MacBook running Apple OS X 10.11.5 (El Capitan).

Initial Setup

iWorkflow boots just like any Linux-based virtual machine. To start working with its administrative interface, you’ll need to connect it to a network. You require:

• Management IP Address/Netmask
• Default Gateway (Optional)
• DNS (Optional)

If you want to automate some of the license activation process, you will require DNS and a Default Gateway that can reach F5’s activations servers. I have listed them as ‘Optional' here because you can manually copy and paste the licensing data to activate. For the purpose of this demonstration I will go through the activation process manually to show all the steps.

The environment we are building out will look as follows:

Details of the environment:

LAB
Domain: n8lab.local
Management: 10.128.1.x/24
Internet (external): 10.128.10.x/24
Servers (internal): 10.128.20.x/24

iWorkflow™ 2.0
Management – 10.128.1.130

BIG-IP™ v11.6 HF6
Management – 10.128.1.128
External Self IP – 10.128.10.10
Internal Self IP – 10.128.20.10
Virtual IP – 10.128.10.20
Web Server #1  – 10.128.20.1:8080
Web Server #2  – 10.128.20.1:8081 

Install & License 

In the following video we will cover all of the steps to install and license the iWorkflow platform:

 

 

 

 

Discover a BIG-IP Device

Now that we have iWorkflow licensed and networked we need to configure it for use. The next step in this episode will be to discover a device (a BIG-IP) which will be used in next weeks episode titled, "iWorkflow 101- episode #3 - Deploying a Services Template via the iWorkflow GUI”.

 

Once we’ve discovered a BIG-IP device, we need to create the conduit through which a Tenant deploys application services templates (F5 iApps). These conduits, or connectors, are referred to as iWorkflow Clouds. iWorkflow supports a number of Clouds but, for this 101 episode we’ll use the BIG-IP connector, which is suitable for most environments.

In the following video we’ll take a look at the Administrative GUI, show how to import a BIG-IP Device, and lastly, create a connector and Tenant to support deploying application delivery policy. 

 

Conclusion

Three main things to remember:

1. NTP - very important to keep iWorkflow and the BIG-IPs in time sync
2. Registration key: we’ll provide an evaluation license process once iWorkflow is released in mid-June.
3. NTP - in case I didn’t mention this already.

In the next episode we will create a Tenant Catalog with an Application Services Template. We will then login to the iWorkflow platform as a Tenant and deploy our first configuration.