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yazantaleb's avatar
yazantaleb
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Feb 26, 2023
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BIP-IP VE Migration from MS Hyper-V to VMWare

Hi,

I have an HA pair consists of two BIG-IP VE systems that are currenlty hosted on Microsoft Hyper-V, the plan is to migrate them to VMware, but I want to re-use the same license on the new VMs.

As a first step, I will deploy a new VM on VMWare similar to the one hosted at Hyper-V, then I will revoke the license from Hyper-V old VM and re-use it to activate VMWare new VM, then will create and export a UCS archive and import it to this new VMWare VM (with or without options no-license platform-migrate)

To have a minimum down time, I can start working with the standby device and once everything is ready I can forward the traffic to this device before preparing the active device in the HA pair.

I want to know if this scenario is suitable for HA pair and will be any unwanted or negative impacts on it?

Also, since I'm building new VMs from scratch, are there any issues if I deployed a newer versions of VMs on VMWare specifically regarding the configuration?

Thanks in advance.

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  • Paulius's avatar
    Paulius
    Feb 26, 2023

    Because of your situation you might be able to create a ticket with F5 support and they can unlock your licenses for an additional device for a short period of time, typically your migration period, and once that has been completed your old device license will be revoked. As far as your steps to migrate from one platform to the other that sounds like you are on the right track and the only thing I would note is to get your master key from your old devices and configure that same master key on the new devices so the UCS import works. You can see the F5 master key using command "f5mku -K" in the CLI which more information can be found in this article.

    https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K9420

    In regards to different code versions, usually if it's the same major version you wont have any issues but if you go from say 16 to 17 HA might not work properly other than forcing a failover between the two devices. You will most likely have to re-pair the HA peers each time you switch VMs from old to new for it to work properly but I'm not 100% on that one. Other than that your plan seems sound but will most likely still have a small outage during failover.

    yazantaleb

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  • Paulius's avatar
    Paulius
    Icon for MVP rankMVP
    Feb 26, 2023

    Because of your situation you might be able to create a ticket with F5 support and they can unlock your licenses for an additional device for a short period of time, typically your migration period, and once that has been completed your old device license will be revoked. As far as your steps to migrate from one platform to the other that sounds like you are on the right track and the only thing I would note is to get your master key from your old devices and configure that same master key on the new devices so the UCS import works. You can see the F5 master key using command "f5mku -K" in the CLI which more information can be found in this article.

    https://my.f5.com/manage/s/article/K9420

    In regards to different code versions, usually if it's the same major version you wont have any issues but if you go from say 16 to 17 HA might not work properly other than forcing a failover between the two devices. You will most likely have to re-pair the HA peers each time you switch VMs from old to new for it to work properly but I'm not 100% on that one. Other than that your plan seems sound but will most likely still have a small outage during failover.

    yazantaleb