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richard_76881's avatar
richard_76881
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Feb 18, 2010

development environment

Hello everyone. I am new to the forums and f5 in general but I have a quick question I am sure someone can help with.

 

 

Currently our IT department has BIG-IP running controlling our corporate website, and this website needs to be updated quite frequently without bringing the site down. It is load balanced across 4 servers and Big-IP handles the networking etc.

 

 

Here is what I want to do:

 

 

Currently when we deploy to the serevrs we stop all machines and deploy then restart, so I wiould like these scripts to manage the servers via the web services supplied by Big-IP. I can use IControl for this BUT I do not have anything to test against. Is Big-IP something I can install locally on my Windows XP machine? Is there a "sandbox" web service I can reference to test.

 

 

Unfortunately our IT dept cannot supply me with any test environment hence my question

 

 

Many thanks in advance

 

 

Richard
dev
devops
iControl

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  • samstep's avatar
    samstep
    Icon for Cirrocumulus rankCirrocumulus
    Feb 18, 2010
    Richard,

     

     

    BIG-IP which your IT department is using is a hardware device.

     

     

    For your testing you can use BIG-IP Virtual Edition (VE) - it is a VMWare Virtual Machine - download it from www.f5.com/trial/

     

     

    VE will rin in VMWare Workstation on your XP machine. There are plenty of articles on devcentral.f5.com helping you to work with VE (it is not trivial if you have never worked with virtual machines and networks). Once you install the VE and license it correctly you can then use it as if it was a hardware BIG-IP box so you can run iControl SOAP queries against it .

     

     

    The only limitation of VE is that its network throughput is capped at 1Mbis/s (which is fine for your testing) and the trial license will expire after 90 days (hopefully that is enough to get your scripts up & running).

     

     

    Sam