The F5® Journeys BIG-IP upgrade and migration utility is a tool freely distributed by F5 to facilitate migrating BIG-IP configurations between different platforms. F5 Journeys is a downloadable assistant that coordinates the logistics required to migrate a BIG-IP configuration from one BIG-IP instance to another.
Why do I need it?
JOURNEYS is an application designed to assist F5 Customers with migrating a BIG-IP configuration to a new F5 device and enable new ways of migrating.
Supported journeys:
Full Config migration - migrating a BIG-IP configuration from any version starting at 11.5.0 to a higher one, including VELOS and rSeries systems.
Application Service migration - migrating mission critical Applications and their dependencies to a new AS3 configuration and deploying it to a BIG-IP instance of choice.
What does it do?
It does a bunch of stuff:
Loading UCS or UCS+AS3 source configurations
Flagging source configuration feature parity gaps and fixing them with provided built-in solutions
Load validation
Deployment of the updated configuration to a destination device, including VELOS and rSeries VM tenants
Post-migration diagnostics
Generating detailed PDF reports at every stage of the journey
Full config BIG-IP migrations are supported for software paths according to the following matrix:
DEST
X
11.x
12.x
13.x
14.x
15.x
16.x
<11.5
X
X
X
X^
X^
12.x
X
X
X
X^
SRC
13.x
X
X
X
14.x
X
X
X
15.x
X
X
16.x
How does it work?
F5 Journeys App manages the logistics of a configuration migration. The F5 Journeys App either generates or accepts a UCS file from you, prompts you for a destination BIG-IP instance, and manages the migration. The destination BIG-IP instance has a tmsh command that performs the migration from a UCS to a running system. F5 Journeys uses this tmsh command to accomplish the migration using the platform-migrate option (see more details K82540512) .
The F5 Journeys App prompts you to enter a source BIG-IP (or upload a UCS file), the master key password, and destination BIG-IP instance. Once the tool obtains this information, it allows you to migrate the source BIG-IP configuration to the destination BIG-IP instance either entirely or in a per-application depending what you choose.
Let us know if something went wrong. By reporting issues, you support development of this project and get a chance of having it fixed soon. Please use bug template available here and attach the journeys.log file from the working directory (
Nice, the documentation doesn’t say that the command existed before with such limitation. I hope it will be changed! it can help people who want to migrate to previous versions even if last versions are recommended.
I would have preferred that it be available before. I migrated a BigIP with LTM, AFM, ASM, APM last summer to version 13.0 to vCMP and I had to migrate without this option because of this limitation.
PK: thanks for the feedback, I’ll do my best to reproduce and fix that issue for the next release. If you’re able to provide the BIG-IP model and software version, that should be a big help in producing the repro.
Ok thanks PK! Just one thing to note, the Migration Assistant won’t be able to connect directly to the BIG-IP running 11.5.4 (it requires software versions 12.1 or greater), but it should be returning a more friendly notification so I’ll get that fixed. If you’d like to migrate from an 11.5.4 config, the Migration Assistant ‘archives’ panel provides a tool for selecting a previously generated UCS from versions 11.1 or greater, which can then be used for migration. We’ll get the TypeError issue fixed for next release- thanks again!
