NimbostratusI had a best practices question about adding NICs to a virtual BIG-IP. We are in a vCloud environment and we needed to take a short maintenance window at night to power off our BIG-IP and add a NIC. The environment we are in doesn't support hot adding NICs. If we add in a NIC and wait until the next day or even the next week to actually configure it in BIG-IP with an IP and all that, does anyone see this causing potential issues?
I just gave it a try on a v11.5.1HF2 running in VMware Workstation 9. The SSH was hanging for a while after adding the new network adapter in the hypervisor.
I had to run "bigstart restart" to get the new interface listed by:
tmsh show net interfaceI would plan a maintenance window for a change like this to be on the safe side.
CirrostratusShouldn't be an issue configuring it later. I'd suggest however you at least check the new NIC hasn't caused any issues.
I've had issues a few times with vCloud where the MACs assigned to each NIC get messed up when you add or delete one. If this does happen you may need to do one of these (sometimes both) once you're sure things are setup right in vCloud;
[tmsh] stop sys services all
rm /var/db/mcpd*
reboot
If that doesn't work, this might;
touch /service/mcpd/forceload
shutdown –h now
Start from within vCloud