Modernizing F5 Platforms with Ansible
I’ve been meaning to publish this article for some time now. Over the past few months, I’ve been building Ansible automation that I believe will help customers modernize their F5 infrastructure. This especially true for those looking to migrate from legacy BIG-IP hardware to next-generation platforms like VELOS and rSeries. As I explored tools like F5 Journeys and traditional CLI-based migration methods, I noticed a significant amount of manual pre-work was still required. This includes: Ensuring the Master Key used to encrypt the UCS archive is preserved and securely handled Storing UCS, Master Key and information assets in a backup host Pre-configuring all VLANs and properly tagging them on the VELOS partition before deploying a Tenant OS To streamline this, I created an Ansible Playbook with supporting roles tailored for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. It’s built to perform a lift-and-shift migration of a F5 BIG-IP configuration from one device to another—with optional OS upgrades included. In the demo video below, you’ll see an automated migration of a F5 i10800 running 15.1.10 to a VELOS BX110 Tenant OS running 17.5.0—demonstrating a smooth, hands-free modernization process. Currently Working Velos Velos Controller/Partition running (F5OS-C 1.8.1) - which allows Tenant Management IP to be in a different VLAN Migrates a standalone F5 BIG-IP i10800 to a VELOS BX110 Tenant OS VLAN'ed Source tenant required (Doesn’t support non-vlan tenants) rSeries Shares MGMT IP with the same subnet as the Chassis Partition. Migrates a standalone F5 BIG-IP i10800 to a R5000 Tenant OS VLAN'ed Source tenant required (Doesn’t support non-vlan tenants) Handles: Configuration and crypto backup UCS creation, transfer, and validation F5OS System VLAN Creation, and Association to Tenant - (Does Not manage Interface to VLAN Mapping) F5 OS Tenant provisioning and deployment inline OS upgrades during the migration Roadmap / What's Next Expanding Testing to include Viprion/iSeries (Using VCMP) Tenant Testing. Supporting hardware-to-virtual platform migrations Adding functionality for HA (High Availability) environments Watch the Demo Video View the Source Code on GitHub https://github.com/f5devcentral/f5-bd-ansible-platform-modernization This project is built for the community—so feel free to take it, fork it, and expand it. Let’s make F5 platform modernization as seamless and automated as possible.
Mastering Imperative and Declarative Automation with F5 BIG-IP – AppWorld 2025
At AppWorld 2025, Anton Varkalevich and I will be hosting a hands-on lab, "Mastering Imperative and Declarative Automation with F5 BIG-IP." I'm Matt Mabis, a Senior Solutions Architect in the Business Development/Technical Alliances department at F5. I specialize in solution integrations with our partnerships with Red Hat (Ansible and OpenShift), VMware, and Omnissa Horizon. Anton Varkalevich is a Solutions Engineer III for Financial Services at F5, specializing in ensuring financial customers have the right solutions to meet their unique needs. Automation plays a critical role in financial institutions, enabling them to serve their customers quickly and effectively. This lab is the result of years of experience working with customers to streamline application deployments on F5 BIG-IP. We’ll use Ansible Automation Platform to demonstrate both imperative and declarative automation approaches. Participants will first deploy common use cases—such as HTTPS and SSL-delivered applications—using imperative automation with individual Ansible modules. Then, we’ll achieve the same outcomes using declarative automation, offering a side-by-side comparison to help attendees choose the best approach for their needs. By the end of this lab, you’ll have a solid understanding of both automation styles and how to apply them effectively in your environment. Join us at AppWorld 2025—we look forward to sharing our knowledge with you!Infrastructure as Code: Automating F5 Distributed Cloud CEs with Ansible
Introduction Welcome to the first installment of our Infrastructure as Code (IaC) series, focusing on F5 products and Ansible. This series has been a long-standing desire of mine to showcase the ability of IaC utilizing Ansible Automation Platform to deliver Day 0 through Day 2 operations with multiple F5 virtualized platforms. Over time, I've encountered numerous financial clients expressing interest in this topic. For many of these clients, the prospect of leveraging IaC to redeploy an environment outweighs the traditional approach of performing upgrades. This series will hopefully provide insight, documentation, and code for anyone embarking on this journey. Why Ansible Automation Platform? Like most people, I started my journey with community editions of Ansible. As my coding became more complex, so did the need to ensure that my lab infrastructure adhered to the best security guidelines required by my company (my goal being to mimic how customers would/should do things in real life). I began utilizing Ansible Automation Platform to ensure my credentials were protected, as well as to organize and share my code with the rest of my team (following the 'just in case you got hit by a bus' theory). Ansible Automation Platform utilizes execution environments (EE) to ensure code runs efficiently and cleanly every time. Now, I am also creating Execution Environments via GitHub with workflows and pushing them up to Quay.io (https://github.com/VDI-Tech-Guy/f5-execution-engines). Huge thanks to Colin McNaughton at Red Hat for making my life so much easier with building EEs! Why deploy F5 Distributed Cloud on VMware vSphere? As I mentioned before, I had this desire to build this Infrastructure as Code (IaC) code a while back. This was prior to the Broadcom acquisition of VMware. Being an ex-VMware employee, I had a lot of knowledge of virtualization platform infrastructure going into this project, and I started my focus on deploying on VMware vSphere. F5 Distributed Cloud can be deployed in any cloud, anywhere. However, I really wanted to focus on on-premises deployments because not every customer can afford the cloud. Moreover, there's always a back-and-forth battle between on-premises and the cloud, which has evolved into the Hybrid Cloud and the Multi-Cloud. I do intend to extend this series to the Multi-Cloud, but these initial deployments will be focused on VMware vSphere, as it is still utilized in many organizations across the globe. Information about the Setup in the Demo Video If you watch the video (down below) on how the deployment works, you can see i did a bunch of the pre-work prior to launching the deployment, in the git repostory (link in Resources). Here are some Prework items i did Had a fully functional Ansible Automation Platform 2.4+ enviornment setup and working. (at the time the controller version was 4.4.4) Execution Environment was imported into Ansible Automation Platform Controller The Project was setup to import the Playbooks from the Git Repository (In Resources Section below) and setup the Default Execution Environment Demo Inventory was setup (in our usecase we only needed the vCenter Host) We Setup Network Credentials for the vCenter The Template was setup and had Variables populated in it (Note the API Key was hidden). As mentioned in the Video (Below) The variables were populated to my environment, this contains all the information, i have provided a Demo Example in the git repository for anyone to mimic my settings to their environment, also the example has comments about each field or area of a field and the purpose of the variable. { "rhel_location": "https://vesio.blob.core.windows.net/releases/rhel/9/x86_64/images/vmware/rhel-9.2023.29-20231212012955-single-nic.ova", "xc_api_credential": "_____________________________________", "xc_namespace": "mmabis-automation", "xc_console_host": "f5-bd", "xc_user": "admin", "xc_pass": "Ansible123!", "vcenter_hostname": "{{ ansible_host }}", "vcenter_username": "{{ ansible_env.ANSIBLE_NET_USERNAME }}", "vcenter_password": "{{ ansible_env.ANSIBLE_NET_PASSWORD }}", "vcenter_validate_certs": false, "datacenter_name": "Apex", "cluster_name": "Worlds-Edge", "datastore": "TrueNAS-SSD", "dvs_switch_name": "DSC-DVS", "dns_name_servers": [ "192.168.192.20", "192.168.192.1" ], "dns_name_search": [ "dsc-services.local", "localdomain" ], "ntp_servers": [ "0.pool.ntp.org", "1.pool.ntp.org", "2.pool.ntp.org" ], "domain_fqdn": "dsc-services.local", "DVS_Name": "{{dvs_switch_name}}", "Internal_Network": "DVS-Server-vLan", "External_Network": "DVS-DMZ-vLan", "resource_pool_name": "Lab-XC", "waiting_period": 2, "temp_download_location": "/tmp/xc-ova-download.ova", "xc_ova_builds": [ { "hostname": "xc-automation-rhel-demo", "tmpl_name": "xc-automation-rhel-demo", "admin_password": "Ansible123!", "cluster_name": "xc-automation-cluster-rhel-demo", "dhcp": "no", "external_ip": "172.16.192.170", "external_ip_subnet_prefix": "24", "external_ip_gw": "172.16.192.1", "external_ip_route": "0.0.0.0/0", "internal_ip": "192.168.192.170", "internal_ip_subnet_prefix": "22", "internal_ip_gw": "192.168.192.1", "certified_hw": "vmware-regular-nic-voltmesh", "latitude": "39.51833126", "longitude": "-104.759496962", "build_count": 3, "nic_config": "rhel-multi" } ] } Launching the Code With all of that prework Handled it was as easy as launch the code, there were a few caviats i learned over time when dealing with the atuomation that i wanted to share. Never re-use a cluster name in F5 Distributed Cloud, especially if it was used in a different version of the CE (there were communications issues with the CEs and previous cluster information that was stored in F5 Distributred Cloud Console) The Api Credentials are system level when trying to accept registration or create the token for importing in to the environment. This code is designed to check for "{{ xc-namespace}}-token" if it exists then it will utilize the existing token, if not it will try to create it so you need system level permissions to do this. Build Count should be 3 by default (still needs to be defined) or an ODD number based on recomendations i have heard from our F5 Field. If there are more that i think of ill definatly edit the post and make sure its up-to-date. When launching the code i was able to get the lab to build up correctly multiple times, so please if there is an issue or something i might not have documented well, feel free to let me know and give it a shot for yourself! YouTube Video now on DevCentral Channel Resources https://github.com/f5devcentral/f5-bd-ansible-day0-automation - The Code utilized for this deployment https://github.com/VDI-Tech-Guy/f5-execution-engines - Building Execution Environments with Github and Workflows Conclusion I do hope that this series will help everyone who wants to embrace IaC and if you have any questions feel free to reach out!
