Forum Discussion

phcd_170645's avatar
phcd_170645
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Sep 26, 2014

iRule Development and F5 Lab Edition

Hi All,

 

I'm in the process of trying to streamline and standardize our iRule development. We were hoping to use the F5 lab edition to allow each developer to test in isolation. Unfortunately from what I've discovered so far is that the lab edition is actually a virtual machine that would need to be set up and configured for each user. If this is the case it removes all of the benefits I thought we would get from using it.

 

I guess I have the following questions -

 

1) Is F5 Lab Edition an image of a virtual server running F5?

 

2) If the answer to 1 is yes, I take it that device would need to be set up to mimic real environments and be a time consuming process to undertake?

 

3) Can a snapshot of the virtual be taken to minimize the effort needed to roll out new lab editions for people to use?

 

4) Is the Lab license tied to the individual user or to the machine instance?

 

5) Does the more recent versions of iRule help in testing or versioning iRules?

 

Any help appreciated,

 

Rgds,

 

Phil

 

1 Reply

    1. bigip VE is a bigip running as a virtual machine on top of an hypervisor. it's like an appliance on a software (TMOS) point of view. Only difference are in networking components managed by hypervisor.
    2. so you are right in order to test your prod irules, you need at least to have a config close to your prod, with backend server and clients as well. the configuration aspect could be minimized as you can copy and past part of your configuration from prod to ve.
    3. you can use snapshots to copy multiple VE, but you will have to relicense them, and change mgt IP addresses.
    4. license is tied to the VM (uuid for Vmware for example).
    5. versioning is still not present in irules.

    Our management solution called bigiq could help you by provisioning (spinning) VEs and use licensing pools.