Best Practice for moving from 6400 to 3900

We moved 6 x6400 to 3900's, you can't backup and restore , differences are too great. Elements that appear to work will break in other area's. Lot of time with F5 support to realise it was quicker to rekey. Even with about 140 VS's.

Copy and paste , import certificates.

Jason,

Have you looked into Single Configuration Files? http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/solutions/public/13000/400/sol13408.html

I've had several customers use this technique when moving from TMOS 10.2.x to 11.x. There are a few device specific entries that will need to be removed (hardware type, serial number, license key, etc.). http://support.f5.com/kb/en-us/products/big-ip_ltm/manuals/product/tmos-implementations-11-1-0/19.html

Hope this helps,

Cody

archive wont work i assume, but i agree with cody a single config file should be able to work, you might want to remove some stuff, specially hardware related (interfaces) but beyond that you should be fine.

Keep in mind that the OS is only getting heavier and requires more and more resources. If you're using more than a few modules you may paint yourself into a corner by downgrading to a 3xxx box.

We were recently informed by F5 that as of version 11.4 our 3600s will not be able to handle caching; it would require additional hardware. I'm still trying to track down the details on this as it was a passing remark made by an F5 sales rep.

Hi Jason,

I totally agree with Cody Green. Your best best is going to be an SCF File for upgrades of different hardware types (just make sure that when using this method that the 6400 and 3900 are on the exact same OS Version and HF). I have used that method successfully with upgrades from 6400's to 8950's, but the same methodology will hold true when going to 3900's (which are pretty much the closest your are going to get to the 6400's that you have in ability).

Arie also makes a good point. With the ever increasing features and abilities that are being added you may eventually reach limitations on what you can do and need a hardware upgrade (depending upon how many advanced features you are using).

You can restore UCS archives with a no-platform-check argument. I forget what it is, but you can easily find this out.

If that succeeds for you (meaning there are no hardware-centric configuration features in use, then you're in luck.

Else, you might be able to manually edit the bigip_base.conf (especially to use correct interface references) and attempt to place them on the box manually and load them.

for the bigip.conf file, as long as all the requisite files (ssl certs and keys etc) are present on the new box, you should not have much difficulty loading it -- this is especially true if you restore to the same software version.

M Yates, the 6400s are on 10.2 and the 3900 will be on 11.2. does this ruin my plan for SCF?

I think the SCF format changed between 10.x and 11.x. It might make it much simpler if you can move the SCF on the same LTM version. You could downgrade the 3900 to 10.2, load the 6400 config via SCF and then upgrade it to 11.2.

Aaron

Just for the record, I never migrate/upgrade to a major release, regardless of the method I use (ucs, sfc, manually edit). I have been burned too many times by small things, often just irules syntax changes.

If you follow Hoolio's plan that would be easiest. It saves the time of correcting all the small things.

I practice the upgrade, version to version first and then that dictates my rollout plan with confidence and ease.