Device Replication/Recovery.

All,

I have two questions, but one is short term/immediate and the other is a longer term process question. I will save the latter question for a different thread as to not confuse things.

My company runs multiple Disaster Exercises a year and part of this involves, obviously, backing up the pertinent Big IP devices based upon which customer the Disaster Exercise is for. The basic setup we have our production Big IP and then in our disaster recovery site we have a separate Big IP. In the last year the person responsible, and then their backup, have left the company so this has fallen on me. I have the notes from the which essentially states to follow the following process:

1. Pull a UCS from the production Big IP;
2. Edit the bigip_base.conf file in that UCS with the Disaster Recovery management-ip, sys management-ip, and sys management-route;
3. Pull and copy the license key from the Production Big IP.

As I was discussing this with another co-worker, he mentioned that he thinks the previous people only actually replaced the bigip_base.conf file, and didn't upload the entire UCS file pulled from Production.

I don't see how that would carry over the new configuration changes (VIPs, pool member, irules, etc...) which are obviously needed depending on what the customer is testing at that time. I would prefer to have a full replication of that production Big IP though.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Will I need to upload the entire UCS or can I just upload those few files (bigip_base.conf, bigip.conf)?

Thanks.