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Craigus_200691's avatar
Craigus_200691
Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
Jun 03, 2015

Automated UCS Backup - Solarwinds NCM/NPM

Hi,

 

I have (with the help of this forum) implemented our organisations F5 Bigip 2000 setup. Now comes the task of creating automated backups. We have solarwinds Orion NCM that we use for the backups of our Cisco and HP equipment. Is it possible to have NCM backup the UCS files on the bigip platform and if yes how would I go about doing it?

 

If Not, our solarwinds server runs a stftp service. would it be possible to get the BigIP units to push their UCS files daily to our solarwinds archive server?

 

Please appreciate that I am a f5 and Linux newbie, so if shell scripts are required a brief outline of what they do would be appreciated :) .

 

Many Thanks

 

Craig

 

APM
application delivery
availability
LTM
management
security
storage

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  • Nova's avatar
    Nova
    Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
    Jun 03, 2015

    Craig

     

    You can do it with iControl, on devcentral you can search for 'backup' and find code samples with explanations. I have 10 BigIPs and use my windows Solarwinds box to use the Power Shell version. So it will be a script the will run outside your NMS using task scheduler or cron.

     

    Cheers Mike

     

  • Craigus_200691's avatar
    Craigus_200691
    Icon for Nimbostratus rankNimbostratus
    Jun 04, 2015

    Nova,

     

    Thanks for taking the time to answer, my knowdge of Linux, Powershell and F5 are very basic.

     

    Are you saying there is a way to pull the backups from the BigIP units onto my solarwinds server using powershell?

     

    Would there need to be any additional configuration on the BigIP units or is this all done via powershell on my solarwinds server?

     

    If there is a step by step walkthrough of how to achieve this that would be very helpful, It seems I am lost in a web of complexity ...

     

    Thanks

     

  • Nova's avatar
    Nova
    Icon for Cirrus rankCirrus
    Jun 10, 2015

    Hi Craig,

     

    Are you saying there is a way to pull the backups from the BigIP units onto my solarwinds server using powershell?

     

    Yes and no. It isn't a feature of, or dependent on SolarWinds. I'm just using it as an application server since for me, there are other NMS services running on it. Where you run your backup process from is up to you.

     

    Would there need to be any additional configuration on the BigIP units or is this all done via powershell on my solarwinds server?

     

    You need a place to run your backup from, and based on that platform you'll be using some version of icontrol. In my case, the icontrol pulgin for powershell made the most sense. You can run it from PERL, PHP, Python, Ruby, so you have options. Once that is determined you'll install the icontrol modules for that selected platform. Here is a link to the icontrol wiki - that should get you started. Other than the fact that you'll need an admin account to access the boxes, there are no changes required on the BipIPs. They already speak icontrol out of the box.

     

    See this link for details on a powershell version.

     

    Good Luck,

     

    Mike