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smp_86112's avatar
smp_86112
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May 15, 2014

Impact of LTM upgrade on iControl

I'm working to upgrade our LTM environments from 10.2.4 to 11.4.1, and I'm trying to assess the impact this upgrade will have on our iControl java automation. Our environment is very large and complex, so there will be a period of months where I will need to support both versions. Not being a programmer, I find it very difficult to find and understand what I must/should be doing to this iControl automation to facilitate (it is written and managed by others). I do know enough to drop in the latest version of the iControl JAR (11.5.0), and this seemed to work with our v11.4.1 LTM. But the automation failed when working with a v10.2.4 LTM. I also attempted to use our existing iControl JAR (10.1.0) with v11.4.1 LTM, and that failed too.

 

So, I guess my question is about the backward-compatibility of iControl. Is the iControl version tied to the major LTM version? In other words, am I restricted to using a v11 iControl JAR with v11 LTM? Or is there some way for me to use a single JAR that works for both v10 and v11 LTM?

 

devops
iControl

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  • Brent_West_7733's avatar
    Brent_West_7733
    Historic F5 Account
    May 15, 2014

    If you could indicate what methods are being used by iControl, and what exceptions are being generated, we may be able to help.

     

    I have used iControl applications successfully across many versions of TMOS (e.g. 10.x, 11.x), but there may be subtle differences in format that need to be considered, for example, pool members in 10.x use a [address]:[port] format but in 11.x use [name]:[port].

     

    Some methods have been deprecated, and some are deprecated(immediately), for example, some interface controls were moved into the "parent" controls, like pool members moving into pools, and the old controls still work, with some modification. Post 11.4, there are no more httpclass profiles, so any controls that depend on the existence of those profiles would no longer work.

     

    • smp_86112's avatar
      smp_86112
      Icon for Cirrostratus rankCirrostratus
      May 15, 2014
      Thank you for your response. The immediate showstopper was this exception in a stack trace: >Exception: (iControl/SystemFailoverLocator) bad major version at offset=6 Is that enough, or do I need to try and get deeper into the code?