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ora_68925's avatar
ora_68925
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Jun 21, 2011

Upgrading services with no downtime

Can I upgrade the services being provided on a BIG-IP LTM without creating downtime for the client ?

 

 

I know you have to reboot after you register with a new key but what about just adding new services on top of already existing ones ? Do you still need a reboot , hence downtime , or is there a trick to work around that ?

 

management
monitoring

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  • hooleylist's avatar
    hooleylist
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Jun 21, 2011
    Hi Ora,

     

     

    Are you asking about upgrading the LTM OS version? If so, do you have a redundant pair of units? If both are true, you can upgrade with a single forced reconnect of connections when you fail over to upgrade the peer unit.

     

     

    If you're talking about upgrading the application being load balanced, you should be able to do this without any downtime if the application can handle sessions from the old version.

     

     

    Aaron
  • nitass's avatar
    nitass
    Icon for Employee rankEmployee
    Jun 21, 2011
    i'm not sure but i guess u mean adding add-on feature (license).

     

     

    i understand we've to either restart (bigstart restart) or reboot unit to let tmm recognize license.

     

    so, i don't think it's possible to not having downtime.
  • Colin_Walker_12's avatar
    Colin_Walker_12
    Historic F5 Account
    Jun 21, 2011
    As hoolio was saying above, nitass, it's possible if they have a redundant pair, and are able to fail traffic over from one to the other. Ideally you'd upgrade the standby unit first, verify all went well, then fail traffic over to that unit, making it the active unit. The original unit could then be upgraded, and clients shouldn't see any downtime if all goes well.

     

     

    Colin
  • ora_68925's avatar
    ora_68925
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jun 21, 2011
    Well , as I remember on Linux machines if you do an update in CLI you can reboot the daemon running the service without logging out or rebooting the machine.

     

     

    Can't something similar be done on F5 ?

     

     

    We do have redundancy but we also have a customer who expects us to bend the laws of reality to their whim. :((
  • hooleylist's avatar
    hooleylist
    Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
    Jun 21, 2011
    Are you asking about adding module addon keys to an existing license? For 9.x you must reboot. For 10.x you don't need to, but daemons may be restarted. Either way, I suggest activating the new license on the standby unit, failing over during a maintenance window and then activating the new license on the peer unit.

     

     

    Aaron
  • ora_68925's avatar
    ora_68925
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jun 23, 2011
    @aaron aka hoolio

     

     

    Yes , we may need to install new services without rebooting the machines. And we do have 10.x so it will probably work. Yes I know the policy for upgrading F5 machines but our customer might consider a simple reboot of a standby unit as "downtime" - so you see my problem.

     

    Do we have to do it in CLI or GUI ?

     

    Is there a guide to doing something that goes completely against F5 official recommendations ?