Forum Discussion

Dan_L1's avatar
Dan_L1
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
May 07, 2014

Adding LTM's for migration 11.4.1 HF2

I have a unique situation I'm looking for a little guidance on. We currently are in the process of replacing all of our hardware with new hardware, moving from 8900's to 10200's. What we're doing is creating a side-by-side environment with access to all the same VLAN's and the plan is to add additional LTM instances to a cluster that already has an active/standby setup.

 

Has anyone ever done this before? Do you just add the additional LTM's to the cluster as a sync-only so they get all the objects and match the current devices? Everything is running 11.4.1 HF2. We will also be migrating the GTM's from 1600's to 2000S devices and hoped to just add the new instances into the current pair of GTM's.

 

Obviously this is all trying to be achieved with 0 downtime.

 

Thanks for any tips!

 

7 Replies

  • This is more than possible where LTM is concerned (I've no idea regarding GTM).

     

    As long as you have all the good stuff like MAC Masquerade and Traffic Groups set up then it should just be a matter of adding the new devices to the Device Group and moving TGs around between members as and when necessary.

     

  • For the GTMs, you should be able to add the new units to the GTM sync group and they'll receive all of the global traffic configurations. None of the locally defined configuration (network, LTM, etc.) will get synchronized so that part may have to be done manually.

     

    • Dan_L1's avatar
      Dan_L1
      Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
      Thank you - that's what I was hoping for, I can always create a traffic group outside of DNS Synchronization to bring over the servers/etc. In case they don't come over w/ the bigip_add.
  • Dan_L1's avatar
    Dan_L1
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus

    So we tried to do this over the weekend, after being able to get all devices into the same device-failover group they would not synchronize with one another. Worked with F5 support and they indicated that device-failover groups are only supported with equivalent hardware (we are adding members currently on 8900's with two new instances on 10200v hypervisor as mentioned above).

     

    So looks like it may not be possible, in theory it seemed like it would work, but in practice it did not. Anyone ever do it successfully?

     

    • Cory_50405's avatar
      Cory_50405
      Icon for Noctilucent rankNoctilucent
      Did you also encounter issues with the GTM sync group, or just with the LTM piece?
    • Dan_L1's avatar
      Dan_L1
      Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
      Didn't get a chance to move onto the GTM's since we couldn't get the LTM's working properly (they were stage one of the migration).