Knowledge sharing: Containers, Kubernetes, Openshift, F5 Container Connector, NGINX Ingress
For anyone interested about the free traning for "F5 Container Connector for Kubernetes" or "F5 OpenShift Container Integration" at "LearnF5". For NGINX being installed in Kubernetes there is enough info but for F5 Contaner Connector/Container Ingress Services there is not so much: https://docs.nginx.com/nginx-ingress-controller/f5-ingresslink/ https://www.nginx.com/products/nginx-ingress-controller/ https://community.f5.com/t5/technical-articles/better-together-f5-container-ingress-services-and-nginx-plus/ta-p/280471 F5 Devcentral also has youtube channel with usefull info: https://www.youtube.com/c/devcentral If you don't have good knowledge about containers and kubernetes then first check the links below. For Docker containers in youtube you will find a lot of good training for example: you need to learn Kubernetes RIGHT NOW!! - YouTube Docker Tutorial for Beginners [FULL COURSE in 3 Hours] - YouTube Docker overview | Docker Documentation The same is true for Kubernetes and they have a free test lab on their site: Learn Kubernetes Basics | Kubernetes you need to learn Docker RIGHT NOW!! // Docker Containers 101 - YouTube Red Hat has some free training and IBM provides some free labs for Containers, Kubernetes, Openshift etc.: Training and Certification (redhat.com) IBM CloudLabs: Free, Interactive Kubernetes Tutorials | IBM Red Hat OpenShift Tutorials | IBMBIG-IP Ingress Controller Guide
Hi there Wrote a guide on how to get started with the BIG-IP Ingress Controller and covered some troubleshooting steps if something goes wrong. At the moment it only covers Network load balancing without TLS termination but the installation steps are pretty much the same no matter what. You can find the article here: https://loadbalancing.se/2021/03/28/installing-troubleshooting-and-running-bigip-ingress-controller/ Hope it helps someone else. Kind regards, PatrikF5 CNF/BNK issue with DNS Express tmm scaling and zone notifications
I did see an interesting issue with DNS Express with Next for Kubernetes when playing in a test environment. When you have 2 TMM pods in the same namespace as the DNS zone mirroring is done by zxfrd pod and I you need to create a listener "F5BigDnsApp" as shown in https://clouddocs.f5.com/cnfs/robin/latest/cnf-dnsexpress.html#create-a-dns-zone-to-answer-dns-queries for the optional notify that will feed this to the TMM and then to the zxfrd pod. The issue happens when you have 2 or more TMM as then the "F5BigDnsApp" that is like virtual server/listener as then then on the internal vlans there is arp conflict as the two tmm on two different kubernetes/openshift nodes advertise the same ip address on layer 2. This is seen with "kubectl logs" ("oc logs" for Openshift) on the TMM pods that mention the duplicate arp detected. Interesting that the same does not happen when you do this for the normal listener on the external Vlan (the one that captures and responds to the client DNS queries) as I think by default the ARP is stopped for the external listener that can be on 2 or more TMM as ECMP BGP is used to redistribute the traffic to the TMM by design. I see 4 possible solutions as I see it. One is to be able to control the ARP for the "F5BigDnsApp" CRD for Internal or External Vlans (BGP ECMP to be used also on the server side then) and the second is to be able to select "F5BigDnsApp" to be deployed just one 1 TMM even if there are more. Also if an ip address could be configured for the listener that is not part of the internal ip address range but then as I see with "kubectl logs" on the ingress controller (f5ing-tmm-pod-manager) the config is not pushed to the TMM as also with "configview" from the debug sidecar container on the tmm pods there is no listener at all. The manager logs suggest that because the Listener IP address is not part of the Self-IP IP range under the intnernal Vlan as this maybe system limitation and no one thinking about this use case as in BIG-IP this is is supported to have VIP on non self ip address range that is not advertised with arp because of this. The last solution that can work at the moment is to have many tmm in different namespaces on different kubernetes nodes with affinity rules that can deploy each tmm on different node even if the tmm are on different namespaces by matching a configured label (see the example below) as maybe this is the current working design to have one zxfrd pod with one tmm pod in a namespace but then the auto-scaling may not work as euto scale should create a new tmm pod in the same namespace if needed. Example: affinity: podAntiAffinity: requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution: - labelSelector: matchLabels: app: tmm # Match Pods in any namespaces that have this label namespaceSelector: {} # empty selector = all namespaces topologyKey: "kubernetes.io/hostname" Also it should be considered if the zxfrd pod can push the DNS zone to the RAM of more than one TMM pods as maybe it can't as maybe currently only one to one is supported. Maybe it was never tested what happens when you have Security Context IP address on the Internal Network and multiple TMM pods. Interest stuff that I just wanted to share as this was just testing things out😄BIG-IP Next does not work on KubeVirt
Hi all, I use a KubeVirt based Hypervisor called Harvester (https://harvesterhci.io) and tried to start a BIG-IP Next Instance with the BIG-IP-Next-20.3.0-2.716.2+0.0.50.qcow2.tar.gz image. The VM does start but I cannot see any service on tcp port 5443 running after doing setup. What I have seen when I checked the logs of the f5-platform-manager deployment is the following: 2025-02-06T12:52:25.985842479Z stdout F "ts"="2025-02-06 12:52:25.985"|"l"="info"|"m"="Found an unknown Bios vendor"|"id"="19093-000230"|"lt"="A"|"vendor"="KubeVirt"|"pod"="f5-platform-manager-6f78695744-p48tr"|"ct"="f5-platform-manager"|"v"="1.0"|"src"="surveyor/z100_detector.go:60" 2025-02-06T12:52:25.98585795Z stdout F "ts"="2025-02-06 12:52:25.985"|"l"="error"|"m"="Failed to run surveyor probe"|"id"="19093-000259"|"lt"="A"|"error"="Unsupported virtual platform: '{ChassisAssetTag: MachineId: Mfr:KubeVirt Product:None Serial: Uuid:aeada22c-3bf3-5220-a678-91f04ac6db0d Version:pc-q35-7.1}'"|"pod"="f5-platform-manager-6f78695744-p48tr"|"ct"="f5-platform-manager"|"v"="1.0"|"src"="surveyor/surveyor.go:344" So what can I do to get this BIG-IP Next Instance running on the VM? Thanks, Peter
F5 load balancing Kubernetes masters
Hi, We are trying to setup an HA kubernetes cluster. We have alot of the work done on this like the etcd cluster setup and complete, etc. We are hoping to load balance the k8 api servers with the f5 but havent been able to get that to work. We have configured the F5 virtual server with IP and port 6443 (normal k8 master api server port) and setup the pools to point to one of the 3 nodes at the moment to make sure we can get it working. We are using Round Robin and no persistence profile. So assuming we have https calls to https://F5_VIP:6443/ that are just being load balanced to the nodes. Is there any documentation on doing this or has this been done before? any guidance would be appreciated.
An example of an AS3 Rest API call to create a GSLB configuration on BIG-IP.
Hi everyone, Below you can find an example of an AS3 Rest API call that creates a simple GSLB configuration on BIG-IP devices. The main purpose of this article is to share this configuration with others. Of course, on different sites (github, etc) you can find different bits of data, but I think this example will be useful, because it contains all the necessary information about how to create different GSLB objects at the same time, such as: Data Centers (DCs), Servers, Virtual Servers (VSs), Wide IPs, pools and more over. { "class": "AS3", "declaration": { "class": "ADC", "schemaVersion": "3.21.0", "id": "GSLB_test", "Common": { "class": "Tenant", "Shared": { "class": "Application", "template": "shared", "DC1": { "class": "GSLB_Data_Center" }, "DC2": { "class": "GSLB_Data_Center" }, "device01": { "class": "GSLB_Server", "dataCenter": { "use": "DC1" }, "virtualServers": [ { "name": "/ocp/Shared/ingress_vs_1_443", "address": "A.B.C.D", "port": 443, "monitors": [ { "bigip": "/Common/custom_icmp_2" } ] } ], "devices": [ { "address": "A.B.C.D" } ] }, "device02": { "class": "GSLB_Server", "dataCenter": { "use": "DC2" }, "virtualServers": [ { "name": "/ocp2/Shared/ingress_vs_2_443", "address": "A.B.C.D", "port": 443, "monitors": [ { "bigip": "/Common/custom_icmp_2" } ] } ], "devices": [ { "address": "A.B.C.D" } ] }, "dns_listener": { "class": "Service_UDP", "virtualPort": 53, "virtualAddresses": [ "A.B.C.D" ], "profileUDP": { "use": "custom_udp" }, "profileDNS": { "use": "custom_dns" } }, "custom_dns": { "class": "DNS_Profile", "remark": "DNS Profile test", "parentProfile": { "bigip": "/Common/dns" } }, "custom_udp": { "class": "UDP_Profile", "datagramLoadBalancing": true }, "testpage_local": { "class": "GSLB_Domain", "domainName": "testpage.local", "resourceRecordType": "A", "pools": [ { "use": "testpage_pool" } ] }, "testpage_pool": { "class": "GSLB_Pool", "resourceRecordType": "A", "members": [ { "server": { "use": "/Common/Shared/device01" }, "virtualServer": "/ocp/Shared/ingress_vs_1_443" }, { "server": { "use": "/Common/Shared/device02" }, "virtualServer": "/ocp2/Shared/ingress_vs_2_443" } ] } } } } } P.S. The AS3 scheme guide was very helpful: https://clouddocs.f5.com/products/extensions/f5-appsvcs-extension/latest/refguide/schema-reference.html
