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Fernando_Carran's avatar
Fernando_Carran
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Aug 17, 2015
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Is it posible upgrade version 10.2.1 to 11.6 in two sessions (active-standby system)?

The best practice of F5 is upgrade the system active-standby in one session (Upgrading BIG-IP Active-Standby System to Version 11.x).

 

Initial conditions Unit 1 10.2.1 and Unit 2 10.2.1

 

But.. In this case we need upgrade one system and keep active with 11.6 (Unit 2) and the other in 10.2.1 (force to standby Unit 1) , the time for this scenario is one week. Finally, after one week, upgrade the system (Unit 1) with 10.2.1 to 11.6. The other question is, Is it posible force to active the Unit 1 after upgrade ?

 

This kind of upgrade could impact in the performance of BIG-IP and the failover system?

 

application delivery
availability
BIG-IP DNS
LTM
management
TMOS

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  • David_Larsen's avatar
    David_Larsen
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    Aug 26, 2015

    There are a couple issues that will have to be focused on, but in theory it would work.

     

    1. HA is very different in 11 vs 10.2.1. Because of this after you upgrade the standby and it boots up the HA will no longer work and both devices will go Active. This means both will ARP out the IP addresses for all your VIPs and NATs. One way to handle this is to disable ARP on all your virtual addresses and NAT addresses on the standby, then upgrade it and make sure everything looks good. Then disable ARP on your 10.2.1 Active box and enable ARP on the 11.6 box.

     

    2. A better way to approach this may be to upgrade both on a new volume, then if you have to failback just failback to the volume with 10.2.1. It may be faster than the time it would take to disable ARP and re-enable ARP on the other side.

     

    Good luck with the upgrade

     

  • vcs_178923's avatar
    vcs_178923
    Icon for Altostratus rankAltostratus
    Aug 28, 2015

    I believe you should be fine, as far as the protocol/service ports used for the Network Failover match (your case) it should work: https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/9000/000/sol9057.html

     

    After upgrading Device B it will create a traffic-group in standby mode, you should then be able to force Device A to standby and leave the cluster running with Device B 11.x as active, https://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/tmos-active-standby-upgrade-11-1-0/1.html

     

    Honestly, I see no point in doing that as the Fallback process is sooo easy, if something goes wrong with 11.x just change the boot location back to 10.x volume.

     

  • Fernando_Carran's avatar
    Fernando_Carran
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Aug 28, 2015

    Thanks for the recomendations David and Vcs, 2 days ago we do the upgrade. The only "complication " was that we need to configure HA. In this case we ran setup utility wizard for HA configuration.

     

    Thx Guys